


The Rising Sun

by Teawithmagician



Series: The Rising Sun Chronicles [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Adventure, Dark Magic, Demons, F/M, Fantasy, Gen, Gods, Horror, Magic, Monsters, Necromancy, Original Character(s), Original Fiction, Original Mythology, Parent/Child Incest, Pharaoh - Freeform, Posessed, Royalty, Spirits, living dead, posession
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-18
Updated: 2015-12-13
Packaged: 2018-05-02 07:18:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 28,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5239496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teawithmagician/pseuds/Teawithmagician
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Princess Nikteb is to become the wife of her father, Pharaoh of Flaming Scorch. She searches the way to escape her fate, and her way is lying through the dungeons of Necropolis of Taa...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Princess Nikteb

High Priest Tephis was looking at princess Nikteb with desire, though he shouldn’t: Nikteb was destined to become the wife of her father, Pharaoh of Flaming Scorch. Her father was in his early fifties, and to princess’s opinion he was dreadfully old, but also he was her father, and only to think about sharing his bed disgusted Nikteb, but there was nothing she could do with this.

Ancient tradition insisted on keeping the Royal Blood, the Blood of the Sun, clear, so Pharaoh must choose wives only among his daughters, mostly the eldest, but it also could be the youngest one, like Nikteb, or one of the middaughters would also count. Logically, this tradition was quite puzzling, because to have any daughters Pharaoh should had a wife who could have given them birth. Due to the legend, Father Sun was so almighty that solved this problem by becoming his own wife, gave birth to Daughter Moon and doubtlessly married her to become a happy father to numerous Scorch deities.

Though Nikteb’s father was told to be almighty just like his ancestor, who retired and nowadays was just flaming like a thousand of fires in the heated blue sky of the endless desert — it was widely known that Royal Family originated from Father Sun himself, — Nikteb perfectly knew that her mother was a slave, Pharaoh concubine, who was sent to the Lower Palace not long after Nikteb’s birth, her sisters were also concubine’s daughters, and that was how this contradiction was coped with on practice.

Nikteb had never seen her mother. Obviously, she was black as ebony, with brown eyes and curly hair, which in Nikteb’s case was hidden under the wig made of wool and decorated with golden strings and ringlets. But there were a lot of black women in Lower Palace, and Nikteb could happen to see her mother, even to talk to her numerous times, still not knowing who she actually was, though when Nikteb was six, she wanted to know her mom so badly, that could easily give all her toys and sweets just to know who of all the all the slaves and servants of Lower Palace was her mom.

Of course, such a cheeky desire was an Abomination to the worshipped cult of her father, Pharaoh Menkhet. Nikteb must not think, dream or even need anybody but him, her Pharaoh, God, Master and future husband, like the rest of her sisters, who, as everybody in the Palace, to her greatest relief, tried to live normal lives after their father’s look was driven away from them back to the kingdom affairs. Nikteb’s eldest sister, Zukhet, secretly fell in love with the captain of the Royal Guard, and two others, Zathet and Phateb, was dreaming of escape to the Land of Green, where all the hills and valleys were covered with grass, not only with yellow creaky sand, and there they could finally be free.

That was nothing but a dream, escape meant becoming an Abomination and endless shame to all the Royal Family, which none of the living members of it could stand. Royal Family were so extremely proud of what they were and what differed they from the others, that they would more likely die in Palace prison than escape and conceal their true identity to the end of the time. Flaming Scorch was more at its dusk than it’s dawn, and all that the land had was the memories of it’s Golden Age, and all that the Royal Family had was a noticeable lack of money, debts to their own colonies, and, last but not the least, the Royal Blood. Not so many royal families could say that they originated from Sun itself, and that was the thing the Royal Family of Scorch could be endlessly proud of even in the times when reality gave them not so many occasions to be proud of anything at all.

Palace life had its bright side: to be honest, it had much more bright sides than the life of a Pharaoh’s peasant. For example, Zukhet liked to draw and studied art with the Palace artists, who were allowed to visit her only in the company of Royal Guards, who, in their turn, never came to Zukhet without their captain, but who, in his turn, was meticulously observed by Zukhet’s eunuchs. Nikteb didn’t know whom Zukhet loved first — art or handsome captain, but the more she loved him, the better she drawn. Zukhet wanted to paint the interior of the River Palace, spring Pharaoh’s residence, and Nikteb was pretty sure what she could convince the father to allow her to do it, explained her dream with indescribable desire to multiply his never-ending glory — for such a "humble" plea he could never refuse.

Two other Nikteb’s sisters weren’t also wasting their time. Zathet was very fond of geography and made one of the most accurate maps of Great River, which was said to be a full-blooded vein of the Father Sun, nourishing the land of his descendants, and Phateb spent all her time in the library, breathing dust that covered the ancient scrolls and feeling perfectly happy in the company of her assistants, who helped her to compile full catalogue of the Palace library. Of course, all her assistants were women, to prevent Pharaoh’s property from any undesirable incidents, but, as Nikteb knew, that was just to Phateb’s taste: she preferred women to men and managed to conceal it from father for so long, that he believed in her devotion to him much more in Zukhet’s, who never even touched her captain’s arm, though Phateb went much further when simple touches.

Pharaoh Menkhet relied on his godlike power, and, most of all, fear mixed with adoration, which... at least showed to him all the members of Royal Court and family. He couldn’t that easy believe that his own daughters coped with the legend of his superiority over gods and men and wanted something more than just being his daughters and sitting in their chambers like birds in cages. Menkhet seemed to be the only person in the Palace whose belef in the liquid sun in his veins was pure and devoted, and that was quite understandable — his reign relied on that belieth, and he wouldn’t refuse of it easily. As for the Court and Royal Family, they more believed in the power of Royal Guards and hunger crocodiles, when in Pharaoh's godlikeness, but kept they mouth shut and eyes open in case Pharaoh would like Royal Investigators to check their devotion.

Nikteb admitted that it would be a funny experiment to tell father about Tephis and look at his reaction; funny and gravely dangerous. Once again Menkhet suspected Tephis, but Tephis was considered clean by the Pharaoh’s investigators, and Pharaoh’s sister, Nikteb’s aunt, wasn’t. To five chances that father wouldn’t pay any attention to Nikteb’s complaint as Tephis was already found adamant loyal and Nikteb wasn’t even checked were still five that he would, and if he did it, Nikteb wouldn’t even try to imagine how immense his fury would become. And, to be honest, Nikteb liked Tephis and she didn’t want him to be executed. From all father’s favorites he was one of the less haughty and more adequate, and could speak not only about the wigs and kohl, but still he was a High Priest, and Nikteb was Pharaoh’s daughter and bride, and it frightened her.

Nikteb didn’t know what to do with all of this, and there was nobody around her who could give her an advice because she was going to ask an advice for a thing she was forbidden to think of under the fear of death, but she had so little time left! The day Tephis would take Nikteb to Necropolis of Taa to show her mummified ancestors and have her blessed with their Holy Spirit was approaching, and Nikteb could easily imagine that would happen when she and Tephis would finally be alone — literally everything. Stiffed darkness of the underground tombs wasn’t the most romantic place in Scorch, but under such circumstances Nikteb might want to ask Tephis to help her to cope with the shivering fear that loads of dried corpses made her feel by, for example, holding her tight till she would finally calm down.

Of course, Nikteb and Tephis would never be completely alone, they would be followed by minor priests, but they all were Tephis’s servants, and namely he would lead their souls into the Depths of the Underworld when they time would come, so if forced to choose between Pharaoh and Tephis they might choose Tephis, and that made Nikteb felt uncomfortable. To know what your only allies were the one who preferred a confirmed death to living was disturbing, and Tephis, just like her father, was much older than Nikteb, in his mid-thirties or so. On the bright side, he was still younger than her Menkhet, and his tanned body was strong and flexible, but not like the Guards’ with all their bulging muscles and sticking veins. Tephis was much more exquisite, and Nikteb liked this about him, but last and not the least — Nikteb felt like she had already mentioned in her inner monologue, but she wasn’t sure — Tephis was clever.

Tephis was really clever, he liked books and talked about interesting things, like how moon cycles swayed on the Great River fluxes and refluxes, why the desert every year occupied more and more fertile lands, and how the Life & Afterlife Journey of every Pharaoh was foretold by stars. Tephis was just the type whom Nikteb could fall in love with, but she didn’t like something about their journey and opportunity to stay alone for more than a day, and it disturbed her. Nikteb thought about it while having a dinner, thought while bathing, and thought when servants were preparing her to sleep, but she just didn’t understand what to do, and it made her worry more and more with every little moment.

"Why are you so sad and thoughtful, my princess?" asked Andama, Nikteb’s nurse, who always stayed in the bedroom after all the preparations were done in the case Nikteb wanted some spicy milk with honey, or, like in the dawn of her childhood, was afraid of dark night spirits and ghosts. "Soon you will become a queen that everything the Scorch is, shouldn’t you be happy about that?"

"I don’t know," answered Nikteb, sitting on the bed and swinging her leg in the most inappropriate and vulgar style. "Perhaps I should. But maybe I would be happier if someone asked me if I wanted it."

"And you would say no?" Andama showed not much surprise, fingers twisted on her belly.

"I would say ’yes’, but at least, they would ask," grunted Nikteb and made a gesture that meant something like "no offence for the god & men ruler, our Solar Pharaoh, who knows not only the Present but also both Future and Past, may his name shine in the light of Father Sun".

"Oh, my princess," said Andama, her eyes half-closed, her back leaning on the wall. "You are destined to go a Royal Way instead of the life you might like to have. When you are on the Royal Way, sometimes Pharaoh’s people envy you for you can decide a lot about your life, but sometimes you envy Pharaoh’s people because they will never know how free they are in their little lives."

"You speak like you know what I feel", grumbled Nikteb. "But you don’t. You are a slave, not a princess. You are mad if you say what you know what I feel."

"And what if I were princess many years ago? I wasn’t always a slave woman, you know. Once I was free."

"And what happened when?" mistrustfully asked Nikteb.

"You father conquered my kingdom, killed my mother and sisters. I was younger than you and very pretty. He took me but soon got tired of me. So I became who I am — you nurse, my future majesty," Andama gave Nikteb a slight bow, but still this bow looked more like a courtesy, than a sign of respect.

"You should hate me then," said Nikteb, thinking of what Andama had said. "You hated me, didn’t you?"

"It doesn’t matter now," Andama shrugged her shoulders. "If I would do you any harm, your father would command to torture me to death."

"In any way, you are still wishing me no good," insisted Nikteb, but Andama disagreed:

"Why would I? For you, I feel the same pity you feel yourself."

"I don’t need your pity," said Nikteb crossly. "Pity yourself, slave!"

Nikteb was offended by Andama’s condescension. She had no right to speak with Nikteb like she was the most pityful creature in Scorch. Nikteb had the Royal Blood running in her veins, she was soon to become a queen, she must have been envied, not pitied! Every woman in Scorch dreamed of becoming a queen, the most powerful woman in the kingdom, whose life and death fully depended on the will of her husband, who happened to be Nikteb’s father and fiancee...

"Don’t bite me, my princess," Andama knowingly smiled. "I know what you don’t want to share your bed with the Pharaoh, and if I were you, I wouldn’t want it either."

"I don’t want to, but I must!" words burst from Nikteb’s lips before she could stop them. She squeezed her hands to her face, shaking her head, but it was already said, and Abomination she became.

No matter how amusing was cheating on Pharaoh Nikteb’s dreams and fantasies, to see how her sisters were trying to live the secret lives of their own, Nikteb knew what even in her darkest hour she must not share her thoughts and observations on Pharaoh’s decisions even with those who tended to look like her friends and Andama couldn’t possibly be Nikteb’s friend after all what was done to Andama’s family and kingdom. If Andama was royal one day, shouldn’t she suppose to revenge as it was exactly the thing royals did in dire straights of that kind?

Nikteb didn’t know how Andama could use these words against her. Truly, Pharaoh Menkhet was self-confident as a peacock and deaf and blind with his godlike haughtiness, but he wasn’t that kind dumb — on the opposite, when coming to the Abominations of his Dignity and Power he was a violent suppressor if the Abominations were noticeable enough to draw his attention. The ones who couldn’t convince Menkhet’s investigators and torture masters of their neverending loyalty soon met a terrible death, even if they were his siblings — that was exactly the thing that happened to aunt Azeneth, whose screams still echoed in Nitkeb’s ears.

"You think your words are blasphemous? They are. And they are not the most unexpected thing that I could hear from such a wild flower," to Nikteb greatest surprise, Andama easily agreed with her. "Your father is old, and he is your father. No wonder you are looking at the handsome priest, and he is looking at you."

"Don’t you afraid to be torn apart by crocodiles or something for saying this to me?" asked Nikteb suspiciously.

"No, my princess, I don’t," Andama laughed abruptly. "I’ve seen death more than once and I wasn’t impressed."

"But you didn’t say you never want to do me any harm. Maybe you wanted but was stopped by the fear that my father got you tortured if you did, remembered Nikteb. "You lied then or you are lying now?"

"Did I?" surprised Andama. "I don’t remember doing this, or maybe really I lied. So you are eager to meet Tephis tomorrow, but also, you want to never see him again, and you don’t know why."

"Perhaps," answered Nikteb cautiously. "And what if I do?"

"I don’t know," puzzlingly said Andama. "But you know it better than me, my princess. I can only guess, but you see the answer written in your heart."

"Is it a kind of riddle or what?" frowned Nikteb, but Andama kept silent, so Nikteb tried to find the answer by herself. Unfortunately, all that she managed to do was to look around and feel melancholic like a songbird, slowly dying from the deadliest disease — homesickness.

In this silence rose sunset light, coming from the balcony, painted stone lotus pillar tops. Slowly moving through Nikteb’s bedroom, the sun glimpsed in the stillness of her silver mirror, blinked on the handle of her hair brush. Nikteb was stunned by the beauty of the evening: the sun came to her bedroom like this, through the balcony windows, curtained by silk clothes, every day, but Nikteb noticed it stunning beauty only today. Beauty surrounded Nikteb all her life, but she was unable to see it before that doomed day, in which she would be taken by one man to be given back to another like an inanimate object, a flower or a tiara: precious but speechless and dead.

"I don’t want to go with Tephis," started Nikteb slowly, "because my father doesn't see me, don’t see who I am, and I am not sure that Tephis do. He has never tried to know me, but maybe it was too dangerous to try, or... I don’t know."

"I agree that your father thinks only about the benefits of having your offspring as his heir," suggested Andama. "You are young, healthy and beautiful, but the main thing is that you are healthy: court physicians consider you the healthiest from Pharaoh's daughters and strongly recommended him to get you pregnant as soon as possible."

"What? Did they tell him so? Why do I not even know it?"

"Because you are the princess," Andama started explanations with her low, calm voice. "There are a lot of things that princess is not supposed to hear, but nobody is really interested in a slave-woman, especially revealing that she is that princess’ nurse. I advise you to have a better look on the priest. He is younger than Pharaoh and a little more complicated."

"I used to think so," Nikteb crossed her arms, "but now I just don’t know. He is so ambitious. Maybe he just wants to be my love before my father. I know they argued about the building of my father’s tomb in the Necropolis of Taa, and Tephis was angry but pretended humble and pleading."

"You know why?" Andama’s dark eyes were intensively looking at Nikteb, and this gaze made Nikteb feel like she was doing something right, but who was Andama to judge on her? The gaze made Nikteb angry, but with anger came relief: at last she could share her burden, and, at last, she was advised not only to think of all those marvellous things she would acquire when she would become a queen, but something more practical.

"So now you are interested," said Nikteb with triumph. "Surprised that a stupid princess can know something a wise slave don’t? I may be not good at arts and something, but I have my own ears and my own eyes to hear and to see interesting things discussed over the doors closed not so tight as it should."

"I’ve already noticed that," answered Andama softly. "So maybe the wise princess want to share with her stupid slave what the Pharaoh and the Priest were arguing about?"

"Because of the money," said Nikteb quickly, she was thinking quick too. "Father wanted his tomb to be the biggest in the Underworld, outstanding from all his ancestors’ mausoleums. Tephis told him that Golden Age is long gone, just like the Silver and Iris ones, and father should more think of gold, slaves and marble he didn’t have, than of those he can one day acquire by Gods or somehow."

"Of course, Pharaoh wouldn’t listen to him."

"Truly he wouldn’t," Nikteb agreed. "He asked Tephis if he remembered the day when he gave Tephis the right to sometimes argue with him to make the Sacred Look clearer. Tephis said: "Of course, my master". And when father told him to keep his mouth shut to the end of the day and remember Azeneth, may the punishment to her stubbornness teach Tephis how to be a good servant to his Pharaoh."

"Do you remember what was said about Tephis and Azeneth?"

"I don’t care what was said, he couldn’t save her, he was too afraid of being tortured to death too," irritatingly said Nikteb. "And when my father commanded Tephis to watch Azeneth executed, he just obeyed, and that’s all! Azeneth was brave, she could ride a chariot all by herself, and she told me fairy-tales, how could he forget her?"

"You don’t have to choose when your Pharaoh commands," Andama protested vaguely. "All you can do is to obey like a servant or die like an Abomination. But, despite the fact of dying on principle, what else you can do from the land of Winged Moon, where she griefs for e’er? You said Tephis is a clever man. Clever men don’t forget that easy."

"What is it to me that he remembers? He wouldn’t help Azeneth, why would he help me if my father understands what is happening?" Nikteb fiercely stared at Andama, who seemed like not paying attention at her impending looks at all.

"Why do you think it is him who would help you?" Andama answered with another question. "Maybe it is you who could help him."

"Me? What can I do? I need help myself."

"As a queen, you will be a perfect slave to Pharaoh’s pleasure, and slave to no man than your husband. Even Tephis wouldn’t have such a power", slowly explained Andama. "Tephis tried his charms and good looks on your sisters too, but when you were chosen, he attacked you with all that he had, and it seems like his efforts weren't in vain."

"Oh," Nikteb blushed. "Then... I see. I see everything. My father wants to use my womb, and Tephis want to use me as a tool against him. It’s even more disgusting than if Tephis just wanted me for himself."

"Are you sure about that? He needs your power, but you also need his support, his influence and his knowledge," Andama came to Nikteb’s bed, crippling, and asked, pointing her finger at Nikteb’s bed, so wide that five big guardsmen could easily lie on it not touching each other with elbows. "May and old woman sit in her princess’ presence, as the cold marble is mutilating her aching back?"

Nikteb looked at Andama, words of refusal ready to come out from her mouth, but Nikteb forced herself to stop and think. She was frightened and angry: Tephis’s intentions, foretold by Andama, trod on Nikteb’s toes. Every day of her life since Nikteb was born she ought to be sacrificed to something bigger than her: her childhood was sacrificed to traditions, her youth was sacrificed to his father possessiveness, and the man who seemed like to touch her heart for the first time was going to sacrifice Nikteb’s newborn love to his ambitious revenge on Pharaoh.

Was there a single man or woman in the whole Palace who cared for Nikteb not out of his or hers benefit, but out of friendly feeling or sympathy? Nikteb knew how childish would sound that complaint, living a noble life you wasn’t supposed to think that somebody would want to do something for you for free, not counting on some further profit. Nikteb should had got accustomed to it many years ago, but it seemed like that she didn’t manage with it. She still was eager to be loved, to have friends, though life showed her what a terrible waste of time would such hopes be.

Nikteb was all alone, if not mentioning Andama still waiting for a permission to sit, and Nikteb granted her the permission with a careless gesture:

"Yes, you are allowed to sit, but just for one time."

"Thank you, my future majesty," bowed Andama, sitting while holding her skirt. Ignoring the court mode, Andama skirt wasn’t narrow — it was straight and bright red, all covered with peculiar golden ornament. When Nikteb was a child, she could look at Andama skirt for hours, finding the silhouettes of leopards and antelopes in it’s strange, distorted geometrical figures. Years had passed, Nikteb was old enough to command Andama, instead of Andama commanding her, but she didn’t feel happy with it, didn’t feel happy at all.

"Again you are sad, my princess," Andama said, observing Nikteb with her radiant dark eyes. "You know what to do and you are ready to do it, but still you are sad, you hesitate."

"I don’t know what to do! And I am not ready!" cried Nikteb, all tensed like harp strings mutilated by careless harpist's apprentice.

"There is Royal Blood in your veins. Some say that the Sun itself is flowing in its depths, but I had a chance to see the Royal Blood and not be executed. It was heavy and red and sticky, and smelled with iron, just like any other blood in this world."

"Nobody but my father believes in Sun Blood anymore, even the priests! They are just repeating the old rites, singing old hymns and want the things to remain the same, but to keep the things old way they need a Pharaoh, so they make everybody say that it is the Sun Blood that makes a man special!"

"Not quite, my princess," Andama looked in Nikteb’s eyes and Nikteb started. What was wrong with that woman? Her look was so powerful that Nikteb felt all her body electrified. Nikteb couldn’t revert the eyes, couldn’t close it, she was forced to look and listen.

"Royal Blood means that your ancestors fought and died for this land. And they fought and died so desperately, that they become the Royals of it. You should never forget it, my princess. They chose Sun for their emblem because they were merciless and fierce just like the sun. And you are of the same kind, Nikteb. Remember it."


	2. Tephis

Nikteb went to bed early, so when the minor priests came to her before the dawn she was ready, sitting on the balcony in her plain white skirt and jacket uncovering her breasts and making the necklace with the sun snakes which Pharaoh sent her the day before visible. Andama put a white flower in Nikteb’s hair as she took off her wig and locked it in the bed chest as a sign of purity, but Nikteb didn’t feel pure — just tense and tired.

She hadn’t managed to sleep that night, she had too many things to think about. There were hints, and secrets, and plans happened to exist only in Pharaoh’s people eyes when they met, there was life to which Andama and Tephis were accessed, and Nikteb wasn’t. All that time Nikteb used to believe that Palace life was plain, calm and just a little boring, but what she learned was bursting her mind.

It wasn’t a surprise that nobody really liked her father. Pharaohs of the past were strict and stubborn, fierce to outlanders and even fiercer to the inlanders, but Menkhet was the worst. Not because he was fiercer or more stubborn than the priests and the court could cope with, but even to Nikteb’s opinion he was a really bad ruler, and priests were not going on with that easily.

It seemed like that Tephis was the head of the snake, whose long, gracious yet deadly body, made of whispers and incense, wriggled in the inner chambers of temples. The priests were against Pharaoh’s deeds, the priests told he was emptying the treasury in vain, not even waging a war: a war firstly took and when gave, but Menkhet wasn’t interested neither in wars nor in expansions like the tyrants of the past.

Menkhet wanted more honours, kings bending before him; a higher pyramid; more ceremonies glorifying his greatness. Menkhet didn’t want to do anything to get that he wanted, he just wanted more and what he already had became more and more unsatisfying, and the treasury — emptier and emptier day after day. Nikteb wasn’t an experienced court player, but she had eyes and saw all the crumbled walls, faded gilding and chipped statues nobody was going to restore. Menkhet didn’t have money enough to satisfy his royal hunger, so several days ago, just before the wedding which would require an outstanding amount of gold, he decided to do what priests just couldn’t stand: to impose taxes.

Priests told Menkhet that imposing more taxes on the people could lead to the situation in which some day the people just wouldn’t have anything to give, but priests were concerned with the people only in case the people could attack the temples, shouting that Father Sun abandoned Scorch because the priests became Abominations and enchanted the Pharaoh. Nikteb knew that such things had happened in her grandfathers’ grandfather reign, so priests’ fears were quite justified.

According to the Chronicles, in the year the taxes became unbearable, locusts destroyed the wheat, and, possibly, the rain of frogs and toads spread over the country, desperate people, Pharaoh’s peasants and workers, came and burned the temples with the priests locked inside. The people of Scorch were afraid of the Living God’s wrath more than the famine and locusts together, but they could easily turn on priests, blaming them for all the miseries they had incurred on them and the land by darkening the Pharaoh’s vision and not driving away demons that made him torture his loyal servants.

Nikteb didn’t know how the people lived beyond the Palace’s gates, and in truth, was more concerned with the idea of not becoming her father’s wife, and that was her greatest mistake. The faster Nikteb would get into understanding the people’s needs, the sooner she could be able to understand Tephis intentions, and the sooner she will understand Tephis’ intentions, the sooner they could ally against Menkhet, but one only night was not enough to catch up with all that passed by Nikteb, involved in her carefree life.

Of course, Andama didn’t tell Nikteb "you and Tephis should ally against your father". She hinted, and every time she hinted, Nikteb felt the dreadful cold in her chest, slowly entwining her heart and scorching it with frost. Nikteb understood what was all about, she was young but never stupid. Priests didn’t want Menkhet to be Pharaoh anymore, but also they, who’d been the servants of the Royal Descendants for thousands of years, understood that they couldn’t get rid of Menkhet while they didn’t have a decent substitution for him.

The land of the Flaming Scorch must have a Pharaoh, and that was the Law of the Sun; even the priests couldn’t ignore the Law of the Sun. While Pharaoh sat on his throne, the Sun rose above the land, and if the Royal Blood ran dry and no Pharaoh commanded the Sun to rise, that would mean the beginning of the reign of Chaos, when the dead would arise and the demons would break out of the Underworld to feast on the souls of the living.

Nikteb was always sceptical towards this legend and the Laws of the Sun itself. What Tephis thought on this prophecy remained unclear, but the priests were less than the Royal Court inclined to believe that only the Holy Reign of the Blood of the Sun stood between the land and all the dreadful diseases, locked in the depths of the Underworld, but still they hesitated and acted cautiously. So, in all their scepticism, they were afraid, and they waited to the day Menkhet would have the heir, and here started the Nikteb’s part.

"But if Tephis just like my father needs a heir, what can I afford him but my womb?" asked Nikteb desperately, but Andama wouldn’t answer her and spoke with riddles again:

"Think, my princess. Think what you have what is more precious than your womb and of what Tephis in his determinedness has forgotten. You have the keys to the kingdom in your own hands, and the day you will understand it will be the day of your glory."

Three bald priests covered with golden paint opened balcony doors, approached to Nikteb and kneeled before her. She saw them walking into her chambers, their bodies shimmering in the gleaming light of bronzier on brass cow legs, warming her sleep. Priests looked like moving statues with their passionless smooth faces and bound movements; Nikteb guessed it was the only way to move and not to smudge the paint, but still she felt uneasy when two golden priests come to her and outstretched his hands. The third one was lying before Nikteb’s feet like a dog, so, getting up from the couch, Nikteb stepped on his naked back, "not to defile her feet with the touch of the Underworld unholy cover".

In the end, the precious paint was smudged, but the priest acted like the paint was supposed to be smudged under Nikteb’s feet. The rite was old and Nikteb didn’t manage to find it’s detailed description in the Palace library: papyruses were more about religious mysticism than of how it was actually done, how much money were spent, priests, horses and slaves tapped. Nikteb asked herself if there were more priests to step on because three were obviously not enough, but the three priests were changing quickly under her feet and at her arms. In each’s turn one was holding her hand, and two were changing beneath her feet, so Nikteb was able to move slowly towards the doors of her bedroom, where the palanquin awaited carried by four big blinded slaves.

It was an early morning, early even for the priests who’s duty included performing a lot of rites before sunrise, but still there was somebody in the Palace, and when it was nobody whom Nikteb could see or, at least, hear, as though everybody died and the Palace became the tomb itself. Nikteb felt puzzled, but not for a very long time: if there was nobody in the Palace but her, the priests and four blind slaves, then the Palace people were commanded to stay inside till Nikteb’s sacramental was over. When being carried through the gallery on the garden wall, Nikteb took a look on a lake with sleeping flamingos, pet panther Azula and a dusty pavilion painted with pale water lilies, where Nikteb was used to have an afternoon nap.

When Nikteb would come back from Necropolis, Tephis must bring her right back to the beginning of the bridal ceremony, prepared in the temple of the Sun out in the Royal City of Maneha: ancient texts were clear about that part. Built of whitest marble from the rocks on the Night Side of the desert and decorated with the huge bas-reliefs of pure gold, embodying Father Sun and his Guiding Eye, Temple of the Sun was the main from numerous Maneha temples and was built by one of the Iris Age Pharaohs, supposedly Phamontra, who had a weird sense of humour and insisted of bas-relief were made of a gold so bright, that glittering in the noon they could get a man blind.

As it always happened in Scorch, priests of future generations found a practical use for a strange Phamontra, who was hinted on being a sadistic bastard even by historians, joke: if slaves must have been blind for some ceremonial reason, they were blinded by the Temple of the Sun bass-relief shining, just like the slaves carrying Nikteb’s palanquin. After slightly jiggling run down the neverending staircase with walls covered with frescoes of numerous victories of numerous Scorch Pharaohs over their also numerous enemies, palanquin started and the slaves bent on their knees. Through the gas curtain Nikteb could see a silhouette of a tall man bowed before the palanquin, and when she heard the voice of High Priest Tephis, "Come, my princess, and let me take you in the land where your fathers sleep."

Hearing Tephis’s voice was always stunning, Nikteb could think nothing but of how charming it sounded. It was milk and honey; velvet of the desert night; naked bodies entwining in the darkness of the boudoir, filled with cardamon odour of the sweat and lust. For a moment Nikteb forgot of all that Andama told her, she just wanted Tephis to speak, to call her his princess once again, to whisper the words right into her ears, to touch her and repeated that she was a princess to him, his beloved princess and he would anything to please her.

"My princess," Tephis called once again, and Nikteb answered in a faint voice:

"Yes, priest."

"Would you honour me with coming out?" there was a smile in his voice, Nikteb was sure that he perfectly knew what impression he always made on her, and it outraged her. Too many people but Nikteb’s father had power over her life — Tephis, Andama, her sisters. How could she become a queen if not being able to manage with her own emotions and get the grip of her life?

The word "queen" slightly irritated Nikteb, it remembered of her father, so she couldn’t say to herself that she was going to act like a queen, but at least, she was going to make it as a princess. Nikteb took Tephis’ hand, got out of the palanquin, and gave Tephis the most arrogant look she could figure.

"You are honoured. Now do the rest, priest," said Nikteb, unwittingly copied imperious intonations of the Pharaoh. Nikteb wanted to offense Tephis, and she succeeded: he said nothing, didn’t even move an eyebrow, but she felt that something dark rose between them. After a pause so small that it could easily go unnoticed, Tephis said with the slightest coldness in his voice, "Let us go to the chariot, then".

The chariot in which High Priests were taking Pharaoh’s daughters and brides into Necropolis of Taa was made of birch from northern island colonies, iron tree guseli, whose whitewashed bodies were seen rising from the sand in the Deep Desert and decorative dark ashwood from the Land of Sunset, covered with black gold plates. Birch was for chariot axis and had no meaning, iron tree guseli was for the inevitability of death, black ashwood was for the grief of loving ones, and black gold remembered of Daughter Moon, who was sometimes called Winged Moon, sullen Nightrealm, where she came every sunrise and stayed to every other sunset to cry over her sacred duty to collect the souls of the dead and keep her in her sorrowful kingdom.

Journey to Necropolis meant the death of Pharaoh’s daughter, a Chosen Maid, and her reborn in the Land of the Dead as a king’s bride and future queen. Being taken by the High Priest played the role of a guardian spirit to the Necropolis in the early morning, the Chosen Maid meditated on the royal corpses, grieved on them with the Daughter Moon’s sacred blessing, awaiting Father Sun descendence in the evening, when he, tired of driving the Chariot of the Day Flame, came to rest his head on Daughter Moon’s silver pillow.

When — here the description of the rite became suspiciously unclear — "Father Sun will fill the Chosen Maid with his Golden Seed and make her blossom like a Lotus of Dawn, prepared to hold and carry the Harvest of Flame". Nikteb didn’t understand what should it mean, and words like "seed" and "harvest", especially written in capital letters, made her nervous. What Tephis was going to do with her in Necropolis? Only to think that her father, who would never let his daughters to be with the man who wasn’t he himself alone in an empty room, or, in the case of unintentionally allowing that, would prefer to have his daughters dead than gossiped of their unfaithfulness to Pharaoh, would let Nikteb to have a ride with Tephis into the abandoned city of the dead sounded strange.

Nikteb never thought of it like this, but maybe it was just a time to. Men were never allowed to accompany women of Royal Family if they weren’t eunuchs, or if they weren’t observed by eunuchs armed for just such an occasion — any occasion, in truth. If they weren’t eunuchs, weren’t soon to become or if there were no eunuchs on the horizon, they were always accompanied by numerous bodyguards, slaves, servants, Royal Guards, nurses, musicians and Pharaoh’s spies also called "lizards" for they were so slick that could run over the walls. And if men were allowed, and weren’t eunuchs, and were allowed by Pharaoh himself to do it all alone only in the company of their loyal people (here — the minor priests), and were supposed to stay with princesses like this underground for a light day it should had meant something, and Nikteb was sure she wouldn’t that "something" like.

Tephis came down the white stairs to the black chariot with seven black horses harnessed, chariots of escorting priests standing nearby. Huge Morning Breeze palace gates were open and Nikteb could see yellowish embankment of the Great River Sighil and the houses of the nobles set in gardens on its another side. Towers of the Temple of the Sun were rising from the High City like the spears of light yet bathing in the mild darkness which always preceded dawn, and after it Nikteb saw the smokes of the Lower City, were Pharaoh’s people — not the ones in goldened and silvered wigs, common people — lived.

"My princess, don’t make your family wait," asked Tephis with patience, and Nikteb thought that she didn’t want to go with him, she didn’t want the rite to be completed, no matter what it might have meant for her. Papyruses told Nikteb strange things, as always did, but those things were more strange than the others. Nikteb suspected that there was no danger for her and all the stuff about Sun Seed would appear a meditation in a crypt or saying prayers in some kind of underground chapel, linked with fertility rites traditionally basing on the affluent cycles of Sighil, but yet she felt uncomfortable thinking of the journey into the Valley of the Kings where the entrance to the Necropolis towered.

The thought of Necropolis let Nikteb understood that disturbed her: the logical part of all of that. What could Nikteb possibly learn from the shrunken bodies of the dead kings, wrapped in aromatic linen bandages slowly crumbling in the dry darkness of stone sarcophagi? Nikteb saw her city, Maneha, for the first time and she was more interested in the ones who lived there, not in the ones who was already departed from the land of the living. Nikteb used to think of a kingdom like of something alive and restive, like a desert beast hiding in a grove of guseli iron trees, dangerous but attractive, like the legendary winged snake which the first Pharaohs used to ride according to the bas-reliefs. Nikteb wanted to have a closer look at it, was charmed by it’s strength and grace, but also frightened by its size and power, and suddenly thought that one day she could get used to Maneha... Instead of getting used to it, she was to begin her journey into the city of the dead, lying in the desert like a skeleton of an ancient lion, which were told to be two bulls high, had elephant tooth and were merciless and terrifying, but completely died out in the Iris Age and if not alive were nothing but a reminder, but not a lion itself.

"My princess?"

"This is my first look at the City. It is also the last. When I will see it again, I won’t be the same," said Nikteb, still looking at Maneha’s roofs, towers and temples. The smell of acacia from the Palace garden near the Morning Breeze Gates was strong, but it was easily outcome by the smell of the river, and its rawness aroused Nikteb.

In the Palace everything was so old that nearly ancient, many of the backward chambers ruined day by day lacking proper care, but there was a spirit of neatness, cleanness and artificialness all around the Palace, and the main chambers were always bright, washed and swept with all the decorative figures of the gods, painted screens and vases standing on its places it felt so dead, but the river was alive. It didn’t smell with incense and perfume, more with slime, rotting soil and dirt, but Nikteb liked it, it wasn’t like anything she was accustomed to, so exotic and plain what Nikteb wished to one come down to the River and examine it, hoping to unveil it’s secret and suspecting that there was nothing to unveil but water plants and rotten fish.

"Day changes the night, seasons change one another. And like a silk worm gets in its cocoon to become a butterfly, the princess goes to Necropolis to become a queen," said Tephis calmly. "Come, my princess. It is now time to go."

Tephis turned away and walked to the chariot, and Nikteb with a sigh followed him. Tephis got into the chariot by himself, Nikteb was sure he would give her a hand, but one the priests standing by it eagerly kneeled between Nikteb and the chariot, so Nikteb by stepping on his back was at last taken into the chariot by Tephis’s pleasantly strong hand. Suddenly Nikteb realised that she was standing after the front plate of the chariot embodying the Winged Moon, Daughter of the Sun and Sun of the Dead, and right between Tephis’ arms holding the reins.

"Are you going to take me to Necropolis like that?" asked Nikteb, shocked. For no reason she was sure that the chariot was just a part of the rite — there were no direct references to the chariot in papyruses, they spoke about the journey, not the method — and soon would be changed by a more convenient vehicle when they would be out of the city. It was impossible to ride to the Necropolis like that, Nikteb was never prepared for such tough conditions and was eager to hear something like "of course no, my princess, a comfortable cart is waiting for us in the desert", but something in the manner Tephis held the reins told Nikteb what she was mistaken. What they would have was a chariot ride, and it was not going to be easy.

"Yes, my princess. Just like your godlike forefathers, first Pharaohs, wished," Tephis answered not without a touch of irony in his voice — and whipped the horses.

The ride across the city was the longest and fastest in Nikteb’s entire life. Though she screamed, demanding Tephis to stop, he, trying to shout down both the wind and the rumbling of the wheels, answered what the horses wouldn’t stop till they get to Necropolis of Taa for it was exactly how they were trained. So Nikteb held on the chariot as hard as she could and prayed Ouloo, the God of Many Ways, to lead Tephis’ hand and not to get any of the chariot’s wheels in a sudden pit. At such a speed getting into a road pit would mean Tephis and Nikteb flying out of the chariot and being smashed over the random wall like crocodile eggs, but that just wouldn’t happen, realised Nikteb half way: Tephis really knew what he was doing.

He drove the chariot with all the confidence of martial archer, one of those was portrayed on the fresco right opposite Nikteb’s chambers. He was tall and bald, that archer, his skin was golden and his eyes were underlined with kohl so intensively that they seemed to be absent, painted on his vigorous face by the God of War himself, letting his blind servant see the fury of his eternal fight and enjoy every second of it. All but the eyes he was very alike with Tephis, whom, standing behind her back, Nikteb couldn’t see, but perfectly felt.

The chariot seemed not to be carried on the ground but flying through the streets and bridges of Royal District right to the Gates of Taa, which were widely open to let the Priest and the princess out, to the scorched fata-morgana of morning desert. Was the minor priest on their chariot following him? Nikteb heard the rumble of many wheels and snorting of the horses, but they silenced just before the Taa Gates. Outside the gates there were few palms, a little oasis and an obelisk between the dunes, it’s plinth covered with sand. The obelisk must be the Finger of the Dead, Nikteb heard strange and mystic stories about it, and, of course, none of it were true.

The Finger of the Dead was built on Pharaoh Totenkhet orders to mark the last line of defense: when Scorch was invaded by nomads who lived on the other side of the desert, far beyond the sands, here the final battle began. Nomads’ war chief said that the Royal City Maneha would be a jewel in his crown, and Pharaoh Totenkhet had a difficult choice: to left the city and rebound to the South, there the free (in that period) cities of Scorch promised him soldiers and support, or to stay in desert and fight though not having any tactical advantage, nothing but a pack of tired and wounded soldiers and the Royal Guards who swore to leave the Palace and protect the Pharaoh on the battlefield with any price.

Pharaoh Totenkhet was told to be Father Sun’s favorite for he managed to push the nomads in the depths of the desert and finish them with the help of recruited citizens, normally exempted from military service. The sands were so full with blood that they became red like clay from the banks of the Great River Sighil. In the name of this victory and to grieve for the many fallen, Totenkhet built the obelisk, which later became the anchor of numerous legends about skeleton warriors and their dog-headed overseers, who every night rose to fight the ghosts of nomads and every dawn returned to their nameless dune graves. Nikteb wasn’t much fond of vulgar folklore, but one story of Pharaoh Totenkhet she still found interesting: the one that told Pharaoh was a woman.

How could it possibly happen in the Royal Family, where a woman could either become her father’s wife or fade senselessly in her chambers? The legend told that Totenkhet’s father didn’t have the male heir when he died of smallpox. The land was told to be swollen in chaos, but when Totenkhet came, dressed up like a boy, her breasts bandaged to her chest, and claimed she was the lost heir and she was to be a Pharaoh. Priests examined her, Nikteb was pretty sure that they wouldn’t have not noticed how feminine the body of the princess who wanted to be a prince was, but still confirmed her as a heir and crowned her — or him — in, due to the papyruses, an unusual heist. Nikteb spent hours and hours in the palace garden, staring at the fresco showing Pharaoh Totenkhet defeating nomads’ war chief and his army under the wheels of his — or hers — chariot painted in classic Silver Age style academic manner.

Judging on a one quite old fresco it was hard to understand if Totenkhet features were more masculine or feminine: the members of Royal Family, thanks to the repeatedly incestuous bonds, were alike and in this likeness androgyny prevailed. With narrow hips and board shoulders, flat chests and delicate, exquisite faces, showing if not muliebrity, then, of course, the definite lack of liveliness, they could be easily taken for one another: brother for a sister and aunt for a nephew. This was because in Golden Ages Pharaoh’s concubines could become his sisters only, but in Silver Age there were rarely mentioned a few "from the East", who gave birth to Pharaoh’s daughters, and a women "black as midnight" who longed for the land she left behind so much that repeatedly refused food and died refusing of food, though Pharaoh commanded to feed her by force.

There were more frescos and sculptures of Pharaoh Totenkhet in the Palace, but not as many as frescos and sculptures of Nikteb’s less glorious ancestors. Nikteb had always found it suspicious that a Pharaoh who saved the land from enslaving was rather hard to find embodied either in stone or in the paint. For Nikteb it was another argument in favor of semi-legendary, blasphemous and absolutely heretical theory that a woman, on the one hand, could, and on another, had had already been a very successful Pharaoh. And, what is more interesting, if on the edge of Golden and Silver Ages the story of female Pharaoh was taken like a fairy-tail what might have been an interesting historical precedent, with the ages passed it became treated with more disgust to be forbidden in the middle of Silver Age and scarcely remembered nowadays.

Starting and slightly jumping in the amplitude of moving chariot, Nikteb saw the shadows of the night slowly driven away by the golden light of the rising sun, and what she felt in the sight of it was just like a stroke of lightning, a sign of dawn that came to her gloomy world. Andama said that the keys of the kingdom were in Nikteb’s own hands: those keys was the blood running down Nikteb’s veins, dark lines of which were pulsing on her wrists. A riddle, what was it, and Nikteb finally solved it. Andama told Nikteb that she could be a Pharaoh all by herself, and that was the union that Nikteb could offer Tephis! They could ally not only like a priest and a Pharaoh’s future wife but like a Pharaoh and the priest; the future she-Pharaoh, who could hear the priests and the people and reign wisely — unlike Menkhet.

Tephis had also noticed the light flaring slowly up in the golden string of sunrise and fastened the horses with series of short, imperious outcries. As the horses rushed forward, to the black portal hardly seen in the darkened waves of sand on the horizon, Nikteb was thrown back with all the strength of seven red hot stallions, her back pushed to the Tephis chest and her breath taken away from her by it’s unexpected intimate proximity. It was inappropriate to be nearly lying on Tephis like that, Nikteb tried to push herself forward, but the chariot started to swing on the pot-holes so Nikteb had to hold on the chariot as hard as she could only to stay inside, and Tephis seemed not to care if she were able to keep herself in: he rode like his life depended on the ride, but, to Nikteb’s opinion, was only testing his fate.

Tephis was desperately chasing the darkness, which was escaping from the rising heat of the sun in the land of everlasting night over the giant forests and mountains bathed in clouds on the Far West, where the strange, long-forgotten gods of the past dwelled. Nikteb thought that he wouldn’t make it cause sunlight was getting closer, stealing the pieces of darkness right from the chariot’s wheels, but the chariot reached the black portal, which appeared to be extremely high, higher than the Totenkhet’s obelisk, and obviously too narrow for a wide ceremonial chariot, yoked with seven horses. Tephis saw it too but he didn’t pull the reins to avoid the crush. The chariot was going to be broken in thousands of pieces, bodies of the horses and men smashed together. Nikteb screwed her eyes and raised her hands before her face though it wouldn’t protect her, but there was no collision.

Nikteb’s body became numb, she felt strange, stretching feeling in her stomach, which soon spread over her body. All the crackling of the chariot, heavy breathing and tramping sounds disappeared: a perfect void filled Nikteb, and in the center of this void, she heard a crystal buzz, echoing in her head, empty as a nutshell but blissfully bright as though everything was right and clear. When Nikteb felt a push from the inside, inviting her to return, she opened her eyes. The chariot was slowly moving on the floor of something, that was much, much bigger than it seemed to be on the surface of the desert; maybe a cave, but a huge one. As the time slowed, Nikteb sighed quietly when she saw the mosaical dome of the cave, lotus columns of fine carving built-in the sandstone walls on the perimeter, and statues of Shabaki, Dog-Headed Guardians, who were even higher than Palace’s towers, but when something had changed.

It all started with the horses: there were riding horses, and in the blink of an eye there weren’t. The horses silently exploded and showered down with dusty grayish sand, and as the sand touched the floor, the time pounced them with all its power. Nikteb was pushed to the side of the chariot and Tephis lost hold of the reins: without horses it was useless and Tephis get rid of them to not to be dragged down the wheels as the loose harness wrapped around the axis. Chariot squealed on the floor and slicked to the feet of Shabaki to stop few inches before the portamentos.

So it was over. Nikteb grabbed Tephis’s hand just to hold on something warm and living after all the fear she was through, but Tephis suddenly kept her, hold her tight and coarsely kissed her, tearing the Nikteb’s necklace so the enameled details of the sun snakes scattered on the floor.


	3. Necropolis of Taa

Nikteb held her breath. The kiss was passionate, in comparison of how little Tephis cared of Nikteb when driving the chariot, it was like night cold and day’s heat. Nikteb longed to hold her lips on his as long as possible, savoring the taste of what she longed to call love in her mouth. When Tephis ended the kiss, smacked his lips with noticeable pleasure, Nikteb asked in a faint voice, her hands holding on his arms, "For all the gods, what are you doing?"

"Soon your body will be filled with my love," answered Tephis with the slow snakelike tenderness, which glimmered and serpentined in his voice like a python. "Azeneth will appreciate the body of choice. You are so young and so fresh..."

"Wait, wha..." started Nikteb. She spontaneously blushed when heard of filling her with love, the pictures from the papyruses kept in the distant part of the library suddenly came to her mind. The bodies, the lips, the faced suffering from the deadliest of diseases — love lust, make her fingers trembled and breasts hardened. Tephis could do her right in the chariot, couldn’t he? Nikteb forgot of cautiousness, she felt like her body was accurately created to fit Tephis, to take in all that she was going to give. Nikteb anticipated the sweet suffering of the most private of sacraments, but when she bethought herself.

Had had realized what he was talking about, Nikteb felt like being thrown in the cold water of a morning pond, frosty as a Lower Palace icehouse: Tephis was not speaking of love to her, he was speaking of love to Azeneth, and it was just like a slap in the face. Nikteb no doubt loved her aunt and grieved on her death just like many in the Palace, who spoke in quiet voices what Azeneth was the brightest jewel of the Scorch crown — at least, it was what Nikteb overheard hiding behind the bloody red curtains of strange, soft and mossy cloth from the barbarian kingdoms of the East. But Tephis...

Nikteb hated Tephis for not stopping father in his egomaniacal paranoia, not protecting Azeneth from the madness of a tyrant Menkhet appeared to be, but Tephis kissed Nikteb as she was standing right before him, all trembling in a fever of love, and he was speaking of how he adored Azeneth, obviously gone mad with his love. What was he saying of Azeneth’s new life? Dead didn’t walk the world of the living, it was totally impossible, if not Necromancy, of course, but Necromancy was more an unsceintific heresy than a real teaching. Priests offficially disapproved of it just like they disapproved of witches, ghouls and walking dead, and of any other vulgar superstition, except demons, demons were considered quite real yet too busy with Underworld affairs to pop out every chest and pot and terrify sinners.

"Are you serious?" asked Nikteb. She didn’t believe in superstitions, but Tephis looked so full and satisfied with what he said that Nikteb did it for no reason — just in case, to make sure he is as mad as she thought.

"I wouldn’t play jokes on a princess," Tephis took her chin with his warm, smoothe silk-like fingers.

"My father will skin you alive and alligators will feed on your body if you only think of doing me any harm," Nikteb warned him, but it didn’t make too much impression on Tephis.

"Your father," Tephis underlined "your", "won’t even notice the difference between you and a street whore, if a whore will be neat and quiet. He will have a maid at his bridal bed, and, I assure you, princess, with your body it’ll make no difference."

"With my body," Nikteb mumbled, her teeth chattering. "It is not my body, it is me. What are you talking about, priest? You are insane if you believe in old fairy-tales and legends. They all are scary, but your madness is scarier. Now stop this and complete my initiation rite to let us leave this place."

"The rite, yes," Tephis knowingly smiled, and his smiled frightened Nikteb even more than his words. "We will walk the streets of the City of the Dead, where the reversed pyramids of the Pharaohs of the Golden Age will cast long shadows from the ceiling which is higher than the highest temples of Maneha. My predecessors did it for the Chosen Maids for centuries. And after that I will have to make exactly the thing your father wants me to — I will initiate you, yes. But it won’t be all rose petals and golden crowns, my princess, no. Believe me, giving your body to my darling Azeneth will be a mercy, not a sentence comparing to what I am ought to do with you."

"I don’t remember the Initiation Rite described in papyruses in details," said Nikteb slowly, playing for the time. "But if the queens of Golden Age could do it, I must be ready too, mustn’t I?"

"Yes, you must. You must lay on the altar under the winged Daughter Moon statue, which is holding a gem in her arms. This gem will fill you with the memory of all the Royal Wives from the beginning of the Dynasty. Knowledge will flow like a river, and in the end, it become too much. You will be screaming, begging to end your suffering, but I just continue to say the prayers to keep the gem activated," explained Tephis. "In the end, your mind will be burned and the what was you will cease to exist. All that will be left is obedience, so you could be the descent wife for our god-like ruler — tender like silk and malleable like clay."

"It is... terrible," mumbled Nikteb, her eyes filled with tears. She could scream what Tephis was lying, that he was just trying to psych her out, but... But...

All the queens were told to "change". All the queens were told to be "touched by Moon". All the queens were obedient, all the queens never bothered their kings with complaints and grievances; all the queens never leave their chambers without their Pharaoh: all the queens were never remembered by saying more than "yes" or "no". Nikteb didn’t pay her attention at that fact, she was sure that was all about etiquette, all about Royal Family’s business and the duty of the queen, but looking into Tephis’s eyes, so calm and so blissfully sane that it was dangerously close to a perfect madness, Nikteb could easily believe that here, in Necropolis of Taa, anything could happen — anything much worse than she could imagine.

"Yes, it is," Tephis agreed easily. "Do you know that your father wanted Azeneth to become his concubine? Her heart has chosen another man though she has been never seen even touching his hand, she was sentenced to death on Pharaoh’s suspicion. I was that man, it was nothing I could do, but now I have a chance — you have a chance too. When you will lay on the altar, and the gem start to glow, you will not suffer: everything is going to be quick like a swing of the sharpest knife. You won’t be trapped in your own numb body, you will just die and all, and in your death my innocent Azeneth will live again."

"Live to share bed with my father?" asked Nikteb abruptly. Tears was streaming down her cheeks, but she pulled herself together: when she saw Tephis’s face overshadowed, she knew that she is on the right way, and continued talking. "What a man you are if you saving her just to give her to a man once took her life?"  
"I am a man who is desperately loyal to his mistress," hissed Tephis. "And she won’t be Menkhet’s toy for a very long time, no. My Azeneth won’t let him."

"What are you going to do? Kill him? Lizard spies will know of you in the very moment you take a look at poison or knife, and Royal Guards will tear you into pieces when you will make a first criminal step in the direction of my father’s chambers," proceeded Nikteb. The name of her father terrified her after what he wanted to be done to her, but also, it frightened Tephis and it was giving Nikteb a slight advantage, as Tephis stepped back, standing on the edge of the chariot. He was a tall, strong man who was much heavier than Nikteb, but his position was unstable. If Nikteb pushed him, she could either throw him on the floor or get violently punched in the face or in the chest the case she wouldn’t succeed, but she was going to try her luck.

"This time, I will not just stay and watch, this time I will..."

Tephis didn’t end the sentence. When he moved his leg back, putting the sandal of fine leather on the very edge of the chariot, Nikteb pushed him as hard as she could, and, leapt out the chariot and ran into the darkness between colossal Shabaki statues. She heard the sound of the falling body behind her, it was soon accompanied with curses and bad words, but she didn’t look back to make sure that Tephis hit the floor hard. Nikteb rushed into the portal, guarded by Shabaki and decorated with onyx skulls which bulged emerald eyes were looking at Nikteb with unpleasant surprise. Nikteb was praying gods to put no pit in her steps as she believed the darkness filled with traps, but massive bronze fixtures on the walls started to light up with deathly green flame as she ran by.

When all the fixtures lighted up, Nikteb found herself in a long gallery with a ceiling so high that it remained darkened. Bas-reliefs on the walls embodied misadventures of the spoiled souls in the Underworld, where they were tortured by demons with jackal and crocodile heads, cursed servants of the God of the Drak Justice, who was up to decide what punishment a soul deserved for its crimes. While Nikteb ran she had a feeling that demonic monsters, looking more realistic than the tortured souls, embodied like clouds with skeleton-like axis in the middle, moved their heads to look at her running in the volatile green light, so she ran faster, but in the end of the gallery she had to stop. It was where the steps appeared, leading into the abyss of dark obscurity, where the ghostly green light hadn’t come yet.  
Something made Nikteb look back and see Tephis standing in the beginning of the gallery with blood at his forehead. His shadow danced on the wall, enlargened by magical light, it was human no more — a giant snake, coiling in a furious dance on the impending bas-reliefs, making the demons smile with content. Tephis saw Nikteb too, and when she saw her, she heard him shouting:

"I spent seven years in catacombs of Necropolis at the dawn of my training. The City of the Royal Dead awaits in the end of this staircase, and the dead are neither your friends, not mine, but there is still a difference, princess: with the power I comprise and you lack, they are your enemies and my masters."

"No," screamed Nikteb, her hand on the dusty stone doorway, smelled with dust and death. "They are my family, not yours! My family will protect me!"

"If you think that they will protect anything but their own afterlife — I pity you," laughed Tephis, but Nikteb wasn’t listening to him anymore. She was hastily running down the chipped, board like royal galleys old steps in the familiar green light of magical fixtures, which flared up one by one the lower she went.

Tephis followed her, but Nikteb heard his steps only for several minutes when it turned into something that made her heart squeeze and her back sweated: it was the swishy sound that a snake’s skin made when slowly moving down the rough stones. At the very moment Nikteb heard it she flew into leaping two, and sometimes, three steps at a time. She was flying on the edges of the crumbly steps every second risking to stumble and fall down, where her broken body would become an easy prey for the terrible creature chasing her, but she luckily she reached the end of the staircase safely. Nikteb’s spirits rose, she believed she could break away and hide in one of the elder crypts, and on the very last step Nikteb’s feet sprained and she fell on the ground.

Nikteb smashed her chin on the floor, the pain made her click her teeth and accidentally bite her tongue. Nikteb felt the salty iron filling her mouth, the world spinning before her eyes, and as it spun, the picture of the past came to her exhausted mind. Royal Blood was told to be made of Sungold, but when six years old Nikteb had torn her knees on the Palace steps while she was running and claiming herself to be the Pharaoh's warhorse, blood came out thick and red, just like everybody else’s, and it astonished her.

Of course, the priests hurried to her and while Andama was wiping Nikteb’s knees with warm soap water cotton cloth explained that princess’ blood is more like red gold, but in her father’s veins, the blood is alright, golden and shiny, just like every god’s blood was. Nikteb believed them, believed that her father was special: no human, a demiurge, a creature so perfect and wise that it could easily ascend to Heavens in every moment, but just didn’t want to because of it’s poor people, left in the sands so full of lions and scorpions which came to the dirty yellowish waters of the Great River Sighil, in its turn, so full of crocodiles and snakes, that altogether made life in Scorch so unbearable and deadly.

Nikteb believed the priests and worshipped her father till the day — she remembered it clearly as though it was yesterday — in spring residence her father returned from the antelope hunt not by himself, but on the stretcher carried by both black mute bodyguards from the land of misty rain forests and Royal Guards with their weapons ready though it was no enemies around. Father was pale as whitened cotton, his eyes half-closed and mouth half-opened as bodyguards carried him in his chambers there the long line of Palace physicians awaited. Nikteb ran to the father, but her tutor of dances and languages, Panivi, hold her, caught her and prayed to stand still and not to trouble the Pharaoh.

The words of the tutor were, probably, the wisest under such circumstances, but they couldn’t save Panivi when the silk coverings at the father’s legs clung on the door bolt and fell, showing his broken leg with the yellowish bone seen inside the open wound and poured with sticky red blood. Physicians looked uneasy, but several of them quickly came and fenced the heretical view with their bodies, while the slaves came and covered Pharaoh proper again. Though all of them spoke wise and acted on their best, the bodyguards, the Royal Guards, slaves and servants, and, last but not the least, Panivi — everyone but physicians who were already sentenced to live in the isolated part of the Palace — soon disappeared. When Nikteb asked she was told that they were sent to the Lower Capital City Palace, but though on return to the capital Nikteb searched she never saw them there, and nobody knew of their fate.

When Nikteb grew up, she understood that they were slain just for seeing Pharaoh’s blood, and that was the moment her faith shattered and it made her ask herself inconvenient questions — as there was nobody whom she could ask the things for which people was easily executed before even a formal judgement. What kind of god would kill a human just for seeing his blood? Especially if the god was told to bleed with molten gold and sunlight, and, in fact, he didn’t, thought quickly sentenced the ones who could see more than they should and suggest that their god was not so almighty and sacred as it was claimed by the priests.

Tephis was soon to catch her, she heard him approaching. Nikteb tried to get up on her elbows and saw the hall in the end of the staircase: it was enormous, built for giants, not for men, to underline the greatness of Royal Family even in the Afterlife. It was still bathing in darkness, only few fixtures lit in it’s very beginning where Nikteb lied. Hissing and susurrous sounded at her feet and Nikteb tried to stand up, but her knee hurt so badly that she fell again, thinking it was broken.

A giant snake Tephis turned into, or Tephis himself, pretending to become snake to frighten Nikteb to death, arose so Nikteb could see his shadow impending in the deathly green light. She screamed of despair, but the plate she was lying on suddenly moved down with a rasping jerk. Dust rose from the corners as though moved by draft, and the plate tilted. Nikteb froze, she knew what thing like this meant, but she didn’t have time to realize that was happening clearly, when the plate jerked again — just a little bit — and fell down, into the emptiness full of dusty wind smelling like an abandoned crypt.

Nikteb screamed while the plate was falling into the darkness. Something flew into Nikteb’s face, she thought of bats but it weren’t bats, it was soft like a fungus with hardness in its core, and it was slowly but moving, trying to stick to her naked skin on chest and shoulders. Nikteb was sure that one of those terrible creatures got stuck in her hair, but if she took her hands off the plate to check it she could fall down by herself and break all the bones on the bottom of the cave or dungeon she was falling into. Staying on a plate Niktebhad chanses to be smashed by it also, but the plate felt more stable and gave Nikteb chance to amortize the hit — at least it was what Nikteb counted at.

Nikteb got into a trap for tomb raiders, who were never too much popular in Scorch. The Afterlife of either greatest Pharaoh or most worthless slave depended on how safe, and, if possible, untouched mummified bodies were kept in a pyramid or crypt. Though Scorch natives rarely became tomb raiders, glorious City of the Dead was a tidbit for blasphemous foreigners, so — as it was told by the historians of the past and priests of the present — every crypt in Necropolis had its own security system, and as Necropolis was a crypt by itself, it was no wonder that Nikteb, fell on the plate that looked exactly like the others, with all her royal luck chose the plate which was exactly unlike the others, a trap door insidiously placed over the huge entity of sheerly nothing.

Of course, Nikteb didn’t analyze it while falling. She felt like her fall lasted for aeons, and the landing promised to be worse than the fall, and it happened before Nikteb was able to understand it. Plate crashed into the top of the mountain of crisping slag, and, shuddering, came through the slag piles to it’s very bottom. Shattered pieces of slag scratched Nikteb’s face so she tried to cover her face with her arm, but the plate shuddered and stopped. Thrown away with that crush, Nikteb rolled down the slope of something solid and scratchy.

She rolled and rolled and it made her sick. If Nikteb had a breakfast she would vomit, but a princess wasn't supposed to eat before her Initiation "to have her body clear just like her mind", and she was kind of grateful for this senseless demand. Nikteb wished to stop so badly that she would scream if she was able to, but she only stopped when her shoulder hit a bulging stone rising out of sheer nowhere. The hit made Nikteb drew the air with a half-moaning, half-whistling sound. Her body ached, her knee swole, her skin was covered with multitude smarting and bleeding scratches, and pain in her shoulder was so fierce that nearly tore Nikteb’s mind apart. Nikteb would gladly moan again, louder and longer, but there was no Andama there to take care of her and her wounds, so her moans were senseless just like her escape efforts.

It was only darkness that was here for Nikteb; stiff, musty darkness, scathingly smelling with bat’s goo (as Nikteb still believed it was bats) and mold, filled with disgusting and frightening little sounds, which rumbled like thunder to Nikteb’s ear and made her burrow her face in the slag (or garbage) she was lying on and hide, freezing with fear. The cave was rustling, creaking and soughing all around her; Nikteb tried to convince herself that the plate smashed piles of slag, garbage and maybe remnants of the unlucky tomb raiders wich accumulated down here for eternity, but she didn’t succeed. Her imagination persistently showed her hordes of malevolent demons, hiding in the darkness and getting ready to attack Nikteb when she would lose her nerve, though it was alredy lost in the moment the plate started falling.

The column of blurring, greenish light was rising from the place in the endless ceiling the plate fell. Looking at the piles of smashed slag in that diffuse light Nikteb realized that the slag wasn’t the slag at all: it was shattered pieces of human bones, making hills and valleys, piles and dunes of deathlike landscape. A spine there, a part of broken jaw here, sometimes a full metacarpal or a hip were spread around the stone Nikteb lied by, but that wasn’t all that she saw from her shallow pit. There were a lot of old, yellowish, fragile, but still well-preserved bones around her as far as the eye could see with no visible trace of damage of any kind, meaning fire, acid, or, that could be even worse, sharp knives of the crocodile or feline teeth.

Nikteb was accustomed to death and used to think that she had no problem with it. Death in Scorch was just a transitional stage in a long journey from life to afterlife, a form of immortal existence to which all the members of Royal Family were prepared to even better than to a mortal one. Nikteb was raised in the sacred belief that in her afterlife, after a Judgement done by all the necessary gods and deities of Underworld and the final decision made by Father Sun himself by one of his rays under the Holy Name Phato, she would be taken into the Everdawn Gardens where her afterlife would begin. There, among the ghostly roses, bathing in the dainty splendour of cosmic harmony of essence and form, she would live forever, in the secret garden of Daughter Moon alongside the immense family of her grand-grand mothers and aunts. Her father and his male ancestors, of course, would be gathered in Flaming Gardens of highest skies by Father Sun, as it should be and written in many papyruses, considered holy by the generations of Sun Priests.

But the death Nikteb saw was the death of another kind: it was sheer, unvarnished death, plain as table and simple as a night pot, waiting under the bed to take in and keep all her body needs. It was the kind of death that was caused and embodied by devastation, brought by accident and gave nothing but emptiness, a white spot in the place where the Everdawn Gardens grew. This death was mute and deaf, senseless but, in its own strange way, full of sense, sane and insane just like the look that Tephis gave Nikteb at Necropolis entrance hall. The quiet, indifferent death was everywhere, crumbling under Nikteb’s feet, smiling her in the chipped smiles of crushed skulls, death was the demonic owner of this place, and it was terrifying in its unvarnished inevitability. Nikteb saw no guardian spirits and no ghosts, no small gods or Shabaki, the Dog-Headed Guardians, who were always in charge of taking care for the lost souls and looking after the dead. All that she saw was the immense field of old dusty bones, and sadness stung Nikteb right in the heart.

There was no afterlife, nothing sacred or mysterious in the City of the Dead. All the macabrical beauty of this place, all the legends and myth were hiding dust and bones, bones and dust.

Nikteb might not believe in the Sun Blood or her father sacred nature, but the Afterlife was the thing of another kind. Everyone knew it existed, everyone prepared to it as they could, and Nikteb had no problem with accepting it. There was nothing in death, neither curse nor blessing, it was just a new condition and form, but it wasn't supposed to be a form of dissected skeletons long forgotten in the cave became their nameless grave. Nikteb wanted to scream, to cry out as loud as she could just to outcome the sound of the silence, but she was afraid that Tephis would hear and came down to find her, so she pressed her hand to her mouth to prevent herself from screaming. Meanwhile, Nikteb’s eyes got accustomed to the darkness not dissipated by the greenish light, and she saw an unclear spot of whiteness right behind the hill of bones that behaved strangely for a layer of bones. The spot was drawn-out, high and somehow moving, or just seemed to?

Nikteb’s first decision was to lay down, to cover her face and hide, just like she already did a moment ago, but the second one was to approach and look at this spot, that, from the second sight, wasn’t moving at all. Nikteb felt like if there was a danger in the cave, she should knew it before the danger approached and slowly stood up, leaning of the stone appeared to be bigger than it seemed, which’s feet she was lying at, trying to discern the figure and understand if it was dangerous or, well, quite deadly at the first sight. To stand up was hard, but not as hard as on the lower hall floor: the stone covered with hieroglyphs Nikteb didn’t understand was a great help. Holding on it Nikteb looked into the darkness till her eyes hurt, but she couldn’t distinguish what she was looking at.

The whiteness had the form of the cocoon. It was big as cloud, but no cloud could look that kind steady, it shape also remembered Nikteb of a hive, but of a flattened and extended one. On it’s lower side cocoon looked lopsided as it was burst from the inside by geometrically proportional corners and planes, there the streamlinedness of the cocoon once being a cradle of life — Nikteb preferred not to think about life cradled in this — collided with the logical strictness of the stone. Altogether it looked like a giant still splash, started on its crucial point in a symbiosis of what was built and what had grown in the bone cave underneath the Necropolis.

The cocoon enchanted Nikteb. A dark, heavy, torturous enchantment made Nikteb forget about the pain in the leg and shoulder, the pain that make her started at every breath she took. What a creature could make this cocoon and on what purpose? It should had been so big that high Necropolis portals and passages might have been too low and narrow for a swollen, elephantine body once left it’s empty shell on the wall of the cave. Nikteb’s gaze crossed cocoon’s annular walls again and again, and on observation she noticed a crack parting the wholesomeness of the cocoon in two at its pointy end, abutting shattered bones, where something very alike low and board steps begun. The crack was a line of darkness on the whitewashed body of the cocoon, but still Nikteb felt like it was something in that darkness that called to her with a distant, barely audible voice.

Nikteb was pulled out from her trancelike state by the sound of rustling, as though millions of mice were moving in her direction her from the darkened center of the cave underneath the bone layers, covering its floor. Nikteb looked around, but there was nothing suspicious neither in the dime green light falling through the hole in the dome of the cave nor in the dark Nikteb felt more accustomed to: the rustling noise also disappeared, so the cave sank in faintly swishing silence again. Nikteb took a deep breath and slowly, cautiously moved around the side of the stone she was leaning at to have a better view on the cocoon as the sound repeated. Nikteb panically looked back, convincing herself that it was nothing to look at or worry about, just a noisy old cave. In that very moment she noticed that the covering of bones on the floor was moving like a wave, and it was not moving by itself — it was moved by something underneath.

Nikteb froze, feverishly asking herself if she was able to run. She thought her body broken then falling down here, in the end she appeared to be capable of a very slow walking, industriously avoiding jerks and flick moves. This kind of escape couldn’t save her if facing a real danger, and Nikteb didn’t know that the mysterious invisible danger was — even her disgustingly vivid imagination failed her. As the wave approached, the rustling noise was accompanied with repercussions of mucous slurping sound. Shattered bones under Nikteb’s feet trembled, the cave itself was shaking: what caused the wave, caused an underground earthquake, and it was going to reach to Nikteb.

The moment Nikteb started to run, she heard a distant roar becoming more and louder and clearer behind her, but she didn’t risk to turn back and have a look at her monstrous pursuer. When reading stories of adventurous demigods, Nikteb was assured that every true hero had it’s moment to turn back and take a fearless look at the beast of an enemy impending, but she a princess — and no hero; a princess who was running at her sprained foot, with her chin smashed and her shoulder hurt. Nikteb was too weak to run at her beast, but she tried to get to cocoon as fast as she could, pain scorched her, but soon it faded away. Nikteb still felt hurt, but it was more a knowledge than a feeling: she understood the immenseness of the pain, but more than her pain was the inevitability of run — so she ran.

Bones under her feet started to crumble, coming up and turning into a sloppy side of the dune, and Nikteb begun to climb, helping herself with her hands as well as her feet. She managed to get to the top of the dune of bones, that looked more like a wave of a Great River on a stormy day, and when something, maybe unexpected curiosity, or maybe adventurous demigods stuck in her mind, made Nikteb look back, what she saw astonished and disgusted her the most. It was a huge crater, down there, and from that crater, a tremendously giant grave worm rose. His blind, sickly pink head with black processes that looked like crooked, malformed tooth, easily get to the ceiling of the cave away from the greenish fixture light to get blurred by the omnipresent darkness. Only one part of its body was fully lightened up, and it was the ringed belly, rings on which rose and fell as the creature pulled itself out the bones. The wave Nikteb climbed on the top of was made by the tail of the monster, wich pointy end showed on the another side of the crater wall.

The worm wanted to cut her of the cocoon, understood Nikteb, but what he did was a higher slide on the crater wall with which Nikteb could get to the crack in the cocoon faster than rushing through the bone plains by her injured feet. Nikteb wouldn’t dare to slide down the bone wave frightened by the perspective of badly cutting her legs with the shattered bone pieces, but she could risk jumping though maybe it was not her best idea. The crack in the hive was narrow, so Nikteb could easily get into it, and the worm couldn’t. She hoped she could hide there at least for some time, but even a small protection would be a protection, and Nikteb was going to use it. She wanted to believe that cocoon’s walls would appear to be tougher than they seemed and stand the attack of the worm, but even if not, what else she could do but running?

While Nikteb tried to prepare herself to the desperate rush, the worm stretched its tail and tried to slam Nikteb down. Nikteb instinctively threw herself aside and jumped down, right at the soft spot near the worm's tail, where the bone pieces were so small that they turned into something that looked and felt like a greyish white sand. It would be a great luck, but on landing Nikteb occasionally stepped on the injured foot. The pain was so intense that she couldn’t help screaming, but unlike the staircase chase with Tephis she managed to stay at her feet. Though Nikteb was barely standing, she proceeded to limp in the direction of cracked cocoon, and though grave worm didn’t see her anymore as she was behind it, it felt her. Maybe it was the trembling of bones caused by Nikteb’s feet, or maybe the worm had its own way of understanding where namely in the space Nikteb was because her steps not too often matched worm’s moves, but when it attacked, it attacked accurately the place Nikteb was running at. Diving in shattered bones, the worm made a quick yet powerful move that made the ground under Nikteb’s feet explode.

Nikteb’s head was buzzing like a beehive, she hardly heard anything through that terrible buzz. The worm managed to stun her, and, when Nikteb fell on the ground in the rain of splinter, she hit her head on something really solid. Half-blind and half-death, with the light blinking in her eyes, she touched that piece of solid ground that hit her so hard and understood that was solid stone. Forced herself to head up, Nikteb saw what she was already at the steps she saw before cocoon, where the explosive made by worm’s dash took her instead of taking her back into the crater. Not so long after Nikteb realized that she was, from head to toes, covered in some kind of slime, though Nikteb couldn’t smell it, when she tried to took deep breaths, she felt like something heavy arose from her body and got into the nostrils, making the headache unbearable.

The worm’s spine, appallingly smooth and sleek, rising from the bone dust and splinters it smashed the bones into. It’s head, now being a level low then the body, was moving from side to side, as though intensively searching for something, and that something was, Nikteb realized, her head going round and round like a chariot on KIng’s Circle at Spring Palace, where Nikteb’s aunt so liked to ride, was she. The worm lost Nikteb and was desperately searching for her, once or twice his ugly head floated right over her, but still he didn’t notice her — or wasn’t able to?

Was it the worm’s slime what made Nikteb invisible for it? Obviously yes, and till she lied, not daring to move and draw his attention, he could search for her till the beginning of the new era, thought Nikteb in shock and awe. Relief overcame her, but with the great relief, greater weakness came. Nikteb felt worse, as though she could faint in any moment. There was another problem — the slime on her skin was shrivelling too fast. Nikteb tried to stand up, but she couldn’t, so she became to creep to the crack in the cocoon where a kind of darkened portal rose. Nikteb crept to it’s very entrance under the doughy vault of cocoon’s dome when the concealing effect of the slime ran out. Making those roaring sounds again — to do this, worm widely opened its round mouth, showing more and more ranks of crooked teeth in his throat, — it started to beat its head, tail and all its body on the hive, breaking off big crumbling pieces, but the stone portal resisted his wrath with equanimity of Scorch architecture, invincible to either weather or wars.

Small shattered pieces of limestone fallen on Nikteb’s head. She believed in Scorch stone more than in giant worms, but the walls shook and Nikteb feared for her life even worse than she was hunted by Tephis. Half consciously, Nikteb somehow get herself to the rectangular object on four long vulture legs in the middle of a small chamber, hidden by cocoon, and crept under it. Nikteb was shivering, fever grew inside her body, and with the fever vivid yet frightening dreams came. Nikteb saw Andama, her eyes full of love and compassion, and she was stretching her hands to Nikteb. Nikteb threw herself at Andama’s chest and outburst with tears, but Andama started and turned into disgustingly smiling Tephis, who, in his turn, transformed into a giant snake which hunted Nikteb in the dungeon built of bones, while the crack at the cocoon closed so Nikteb had nowhere to hide.


	4. High Priest Sath-Ren

What made Nikteb regain consciousness was the voice. The voice was creaky like paddles of the Royal Galley in soar rowlocks, and so anciently old that even sounded like dust. It came into Nikteb’s ear like a worm, disturbing her faint sleep, making her open her eyes and understand that the chamber was no more shaking.

Nikteb was lying under the sarcophagus on vulture legs. Before her eyes were sarcophagus’s rough bottom with cobwebs on its corners, dried moths stuck in there. Nikteb saw carved ornament running down the sarcophagus bottom: mostly it was crying people in funeral processions, chariots full of golden spears, symbolically broken swords and the gods of death with their shabaki guards, watching the funeral rite from aloof.

There were sun snakes in the end of every procession as Father Sun’s avatar and a promise of eternal live, there were birds with human eyes (unimportant and mostly uninteresting messengers to Father Sun, who needed to attend such events), demonic priests with crocodile heads, terrible but not dangerous as they performed the funeral rite on Daughter Moon's orders, and a legless woman with a snake tail who came out of the reeds with a plate full of glowing lotuses.

A snake woman supposingly was a chtonic deity of Iris Age, which was generous for such characters included into funeral room paintings, but this one didn't look antique as its colours was bright, and the facial features of the snake woman were clear with no dim effect, and utterly stylized. Nikteb distantly thought that it was no place and time for art analysis of the painted walls of her shelter, but her mind lived its own cold, indifferent but precise life while her body was lying in ruins.

Nikteb felt like being run over by a vagon full of red marble, which was considered the heaviest among Capital City’s builders at least twice. Nikteb knew the fact because when she was ten and nobody was interesed in one of the little princesses mooching the Palace, she came to Lower Palace atrium while it was rebuilt due to High Priest's plan of inner resconstruction.

Foreman, to whom Nikteb was just a grimy child in a grey, or, to be honest, previously but no more white skirt, shouted at her to get out of the way, but when Nikteb gave him the intruments he left on the column, he kind of softened and changed his mind. The foreman sitted Nikteb on his knee and told her several rural but vivid stories about stone, especially marble — he had Pharaoh’s department of crafts license to work only with marble — and deadly accidents, happening to the ones who are mooching at the constructions not listening to the foremans.

Nikteb believed that day that she had the best time of her life sitting on foreman’s knee and eating a piece of scone with spicy beans his wife gave him for dinner. It actually was the best time before Andama came, scolded Nikteb for running from the Princesses' wing garden, scolded foreman for improper treating of Pharaoh’s daughter — it was the time Nikteb hadn’t titled the princess yet, she was called a princess only after her first period started — and took Nikteb away to preach of her on the importance of obedience, which is normally rewarded with not being eaten by crocodiles.

Nikteb didn’t know why she remembered this foreman and why it felt so pleasant to think about that construction, giant pieces of marble covered with veinlike streaks, dust and workers' shouts. She was so confused: the worm, the hall of bones, Tephis, turning into a snake. All that happened, all her injuries seemed to Nikteb to be a part of an especially bad dream, and the ancient dusty voice in her head was giving her a touch of a neccesary terror. Comparing to the midaged foreman, his sunburnt knees and spicy scone he gave Nikteb seemed so familiar, so real and so blissfully normal, that Nikteb eagerly hold on to the memories of him hoping that in the end she would fill better, even this would take an aeon or two.

Frankly speaking, lying into the crypts and listening to the dead voices was the priests' prerogative, as gossiped the Royal Court, and even the priests sometimes couldn’t manage to keep their sanity: that meant a priest failed his initiation and, well, wasn't suppose to make a career at the Royal Palace easily, if simplify the things. But if referring to papyruses, one could find a lot of vague but gripping texts full of slight hints and figurative references, which were still a nutritious food for the thought.

The failed acolites, whose lost, poor souls were considered to be driven crazy by the "the demands of the dead" and, accordingly to the conclusion of major priests, were ill-suited for the position of liaison for the dead in the world of living, the faithful servants of both Father Sun and Daughter Moon, were told to be "too spoiled with the touch of the Dead to walk the path of Life". Some said that the failed acolites were immured alive in the walls of Necropolis, some said that they were sacrificed to shabaki Guardians and their souls were trapped in the stone bodies of the statues. But, if believed Tephis, it was not the worse that could happen to the failed acolites, so a rutal murder must be considered a mercy, not a sentence.

Nikteb bitterly reproached herself for she didn’t know much about Necropolis of Taa, she didn’t even know much about gods and their connection with the world of the dead and living. She was used to all the required rites and ceremonies were arranged and held by the High Priest right on time, so Pharaoh and Royal Family had nothing to worry about. Does the subjects of her father knew more about gods, all these foremen, dancers, physicians and guards? Nikteb doubted so. The Living ones were involved with live, no matter was it a palace, a city or a village life, they thought of death only when felt its devastating breath, and when they felt the death, they called to gods — and if you needed to call to gods, you needed a liaison; a priest.

The priest were most respectful people in Scorch, but the High Priests were Pharaohs of the temples. Secrets of life and death, ability to speak with the dead and "drink from the well of their power", as it was vaguely described in papyruses, to command the weather and banish spoiled souls from Royal Family's Sacred Sleep were only availiable for the High Priests after numerous initiation rites, one more cruel than another. Nikteb remembered Tephis’s predecessor, an old man with furry greysih white eyebrows, always covering his hips with nothing but a leopard skin due to the old-fashoined tradition, which confused and irritated her father as leopard skin was used to slide down, uncovering High Priest's "dried scones".

He was used to predicting famine, plagues, skinny cows, deaths of the firstborn children and wine turning into the water. His predictions never came to life, but when father mentioned this to him, High Priest used to answer with all his dignity that he prayed to the gods to show mercy not only on their beloved son and sibling but also to his poor people, steeped in sin and forgotten the sacred laws of the Golden Age and exempt Scorch of all those numerous disasters.

"I am a living god myself. How could I do not know about the retributions my Holy Father is going to send to my people?" asked Pharaoh mockingly while the Royal Galley was sliding down the streams of the artificial river of the High Palace's Garden of Thousands of Roses.

"Because every night I pray to Daughter Moon to convince Father Sun to change his mind and spare your people. While they meet at the dawn, she succeeds to persuade him, and then you meet him, oh my god-like lord, he is already full of forgiveness," answered the old priest confidently, and his confidence made Menkhet restrain from more jokes.

He was an amusing old man, that old High Priest, the Royal Court giggled when he walked the halls of High Palace, heading to the throne hall to talk about their vices, but one day he suddenly died in his sleep. When minor priests found the High Priest in his chambers, he was holding his own throat with both hands, looking into the wall opposite to his bed, and his dead eyes were full of unspoken fear. After the minor priests saw the old one dead, they sent to Keeper of Knowledge, as he sent for High Priest's assistant, Tephis, to tell him that his High Priest initiation will begin at Necropolis in midnight.

In a week Tephis returned from Necropolis of Taa with leopard skin on his hips and wide braceletes on his wrists and ankles, the symbols of High Priest's power. He was pale and weak, and, when being forced to speak to Pharaoh, could hardly move his tongue. His arms and legs were covered with burns, one of his eyes went red, and from the blood, flooded the whiteness of his eye, a dark apple peered, making Tephis look like a maleficent blood-eyed ghoul from the old fairytails where everyone used to die in the end, which was considered and Afterlife happy-ending.

In the end Tephis fainted right in the throne hall, but it doesn't matter: he returned from Necropolis as a High Priest, and outside Necropolis walls he could faint as often as he wanted to. But though Tephis seemed obviously weaker than the old priest who survived his initiation without a single scratch, the old priest's death made Royal Court consider Tephis a worthy player as everyone understood that the old priest's death was unnatural: it was a murder, and a well planned one — exactly the thing that the Royal Court would always appreciate.

Old High Priest’s death was strange, even the Pharaoh accepted that. Servants said they heard the minor priests say that somebody was calling to the spirits to get rid of the old master and clear the way for a new one, but that was only gossips. In the end, those misterious minor priests appeared not to be priests at all: just acolites who anticipated for their initiation, frightened by their own shadows. Royal Court inclined to think that Tephis send assassins, but still they wondered how the assassins got into the windowless old priest's chambers, if there were only two keys from his it: the one that High Priest always kept in folds of leopard skin, and the other that never left the keychain of the Palace Keeper.

Some say that if anything was done to the old High Priest, it couldn’t be done without the help of Pharaoh’s sister, princess Azeneth, who chose for her servants only the maids capable of coming in and out unnoticed, so beautiful that could made any man go insane, and they were really making men insane if it required their princess. Pharaoh Menkhet loved Azeneth since they were children and pretended not to notice her spy net spread all over the city. He honestly believed that his sister was just playing, amusing herself, and nothing bad could happen if she would have some fun. Princess Azeneth was too proud and was said to love no one but her Royal Blood before the day old High Priest chose a new assistant from his minor servant-priests, and this assistant was Tephis.

No wonder Tephis wanted to revive Azeneth, whispered the voices in Nikteb's ears, telling her the stories she repeated whispering with her parched lips as her body glowed with fever. Azeneth helped Tephis to kill the old priest, she made him new High One, but even as a sister she belonged to her Pharaoh, so Tephis never had a chance even to touch her, just like Nikteb never had a chance to wedge between Tephis and Azeneth. For Tephis Nikteb was nothing more than a body, a vessel for Azeneth’s soul, after that had happened between Pharaoh and Azeneth the night she was executed, Tephis was empty like a broken urn...

Between Pharaoh and Azeneth? But wait, what about Tephis? What did understand Pharaoh that night when he sentenced Azeneth but spared Tephis? Everyone was speaking about the money reform which Tephis ad Azeneth, Beloved Sister of the Sun of Scorch, prepared for Pharaoh Menkhet. Tephis was never an old-fashioned kind, and Azeneth always had a strong will to changes; together they were told to fill the wasted coffers and even Menkhet believed them so much that even gave them keys to the Royal Repository.

If Tephis and Azeneth were lovers, why wasn’t Tephis executed with his mistress in that very dungeon and banned in the lower halls of the Necropolis forever? Andama told Nikteb that Menkhet made Tephis accompany Azeneth's mutilated body to Necropolis and made over her sarcofage all the neccesary rites. Tephis agreed — if he refused, then he would be sentenced, too. When Tephis did that Pharaoh demanded, Menkhet made him held the reform all alone, but Tephis, somehow, succeeded, though without the help of Azeneth it was nearly impossible.

Tephis worked all nights, all days, all alone, locked in his chambers refusing to eat, drink and sleep. Servants told that they smelled strange odours and heard voices, as though Tephis was speaking to somebody, argued and reproached. There were always two voices who responded: a creaky old man’s and melodically low of a young woman...

"I feel you, mortal, I feel the warmth of your skin, I hear the seething of the blood in your veins. Your heart is beating like a drum, so desert savages could dance to it’s rhythm. Come, come and open the lid, let me in, let me fill your vessel!," demanded the voice from the sarcophagus. It must had been a part of Nikteb’s dream, so she answered lazily:

"Don’t even think about it. High Priest Tephis is going to use me as a vessel for my dead auntie, so you are not the first in a line to play with the princess, spirit."

  
"Tephis?" repeated the voice slowly. "Tephis? This little blasphemous upstart, this Abomination to all my service, to all my knowledge — Tephis is here? Oh gods, why have you made me so deaf and numb in this sarcophagus of accursed stone through wich I can hear nothing, see nothing — capable of nothing!"

"I won't go anywhere. I will stay here," said Nikteb determinedly, though tired. "I feel... unwell. Broken, I guess. The worm tried to kill me. There is blood in my mouth. Tephis is searching for me. I’d better stay here. He can’t pass the worm, I hope."

"It was he who place the worm here!" yelled the voice as sarcofage jerked. Nikteb started and opened her eyes, the sarcofage was visibly moving, and the groans and moaning was coming from the inside of it. "He killed me, put me in the sacrofage of thunder stone to keep my spirit shut down in the darkness and to invoke me as his servant when he was in the need of advice! Me and his dead whore are servants of him, but the dirty slut was eager to help him, but me, loyal servant of the Royal Family, dead by his unholy hand — what a disgrace!"

"You... you are speaking from the sarcophagus," mumbled Nikteb. "Who... who are you? Are you a ghoul?"

"No!" shouted the voice. The sacrofage dangerously jumped and sloped, still kept balanced on at least three of it’s stone legs. "I am High Priest Sath-Ren, advisor to Pharaoh Menkhet and devoted slave of the gods! My own assistant, my pupil, my son killed me to take my place and become closer to his daemonical whore, a flesh of useless camel, so-called princess Azeneth!"

"Azeneth wasn't a whore," snapped Nikteb. It was hard to her to keep herself in conscious, her wounds tingled and itched, her head went round and round as the blurring in her eyes started again. No matter how loud the spirit shouted, he was no ghoul, and from the inside of the sarcophagus he could do Nikteb no harm. In this case, conscious or not, she couldn’t let him show such a lack of respect towards a woman of Royal Blood.

"She was a mother of whores, a whore with a hole what could swallow the Sun," scolded the spirit. "She sent one of her servants to steal the key from my chambers to let Tephis in, to burn the herbs and to call to the maleficent spirits. He set the unholy ghosts on me, thankless little brat! I riased him, I made him a priest, and this is how he payed me — my son, my own son!.."

"Wait, what," Nikteb pressed a hand to her flaming forehead. She tried to stop vertigo and think, that was harder than it seemed to. "You’ve just told me that High Priest Tephis is your son?"

"He is not a High Priest!" screamed the spirit. " I am the High Priest of Scorch and Tephis is not my son, stupid wench, he was like a son to me! His mother, a noblewoman of Yellow Bird Province, died giving birth to this cunning bastard, and as I was a good friend of her husband, died not so long ago in an epidemy of sand cholera, I..."

"Stop telling me this, I command you! I am here not to listen to the story of your life!" Nikteb interrupted Sath-Ren quickly. It was stiff behind the sarcofage, she began to suffocate and decided that she had to get out. It appeared to be much harder than getting in, Nikteb’s knee was soring and she could hardly move her leg, her shoulder was hot and looked badly. The priest’s voice only distorted her from her efforts, it seemed like he never stopped mumbling.

"You command me? How you dare! I served to the kings of Scorch and kneeled only before them!"

"I am the future queen of Scorch," explained Nikteb sluggishly. She tried to wamble on her belly but stuck — the space was not enough to move that free, — so Nikteb was forced to turn on her back again. "I must have been, in anyway, before Tephis got me here."

"Ahh," the old priest took a long pause. "Princess Zukhet?"

"No."

"Princess Phateb?"

"No."

"Princess Zathet, your majesty?"

"No, you old fool! You cannot even guess my name, no wonder that Tephis get rid of you so easily to get rid of me next," Nikteb disrupted Sath-Ren with anger, perfectly knowing that her anger had no power here. She was angry with Tephis and she also was helpless like a beetle under his sandal. Stupid old priest locked in his own sarcofage was not a help at all. The only strange thing about the happening was yesterday Nikteb didn't believed in monsters and undead voices, but today she was irritated by how useless they were in the end, and though it was all a part of her nightmare, she seemed to be getting used to.

Nikteb heard of such things, mostly of Andama, then spirits was forced to stay in their dead bodies in wait of the command of their master. Andama called it the darkest necromancy of the past, adding that greatest priests of Silver Age made Pharaoh’s foes serve them even in death, but the modern priests were denying the possibility of such magic existed. Tephis, of course, hinted on that his powers overcame the abilities of minor priests, but always added that it was nothing in comparison of Pharaoh godlike strengh and power over the past, future and present. Here, in Necropolis of Taa, anything could happen; Nikteb felt the grimest fairytails came true, and was afraid of further Tephis’s actions more of the worm, waiting her outside.

On reflecting, Nikteb realized, that she had seen the worm before — not the worm itself, but the image of it on the wall of Garden of Thousands of Roses grotto. The major frescoes was covered with salacity pictures of noble women sharing pleasure with noble men in the lake which surface was covered with multicolour lotuses to conceal the most noticeable manifestations of passion.

Those fresques always made Nikteb’s breast harden and her breath slower, but there was minor fresques, ornamentally framing the major one, there as an ironical caution in perfect Silver Age manner a giant worm was grabbing the unlucky lovers, digesting them and erupting clean and neat white bones from the hole in its pointy tail while the rest was dissolved with it’s acid feces, flaming drops of which treatened the warriors attacking him.

"Little princess Nikteb!" choked Sath-Ren at last. "How could I forget you?"

"You mean the Royal Blood is not a lighthouse to your soul, dividing me from all the others?" asked Nikteb bitterly. "You didn’t even know that I am a princess before I told you. You are, or you were, a very bad priest. Or maybe my Royal Blood is not so Royal after all."

"How could you say so, your majesty?" ghostly voice sounded shocked. "Of course, your blood is godloke and shining like a gold, bud nobody expect you to have liquid precious sunlight in your veins. It’s just an ephemism to your high birth, didn’t you know?"

"Didn’t I know?" screamed Nikteb hysterically. "Didn’t I know? The priests believe my father to be a living god and me — to become a goddess after descending into the City of Dead, but it seems like everybody knows it's nothing more than a legend!"

"Have anybody told you?" astonishingly calm asked Sath-Ren. "It is High Priest's duty to explain... Ah, of course. That son of a spotted cannibalistic hyena, of course, didn’t bother to tell you anything. Was too busy reviving his dead mistress, yes, my boy Tephis?"

"No! But he pretended he was turning into a snake with some priest’s trick, made me step on a trap and when set on me that disgusting giant worm — I never knew they really exicted! And, by the way, I always suspected it was something wromg with the idea of Royal Family. I guess it was all wrong," said Nikteb tiredly, finally creeping out of the sarcofage. "Tephis said that I will be a vessel to Azeneth or he will destroy my personality with the Initiation Rite. Do you think I had a choice?"

Nikteb felt like surrender. It was one thing to be living in High Palace, running in the gardens, sleeping on silk and savoring fresh and tender fish just taken from the Pharaoh’s ponds, not knowing what the life outside is, and another — to suspect the whole Royal Blood and godlikeness of Pharaoh and importance of Necropolis of Taa, was more a politic than a truly religious thing, but what had happened to Nikteb in Necropolis was something from the other world.

"Tephis... Tephis turned into a snake?" whisper of Sath-Ren sounded like a quiet draft came from the crack between the heavy lid and the sarcofage itself, sliding on Nikteb’s legs, dark pink with smeared blood. Nikteb sat on the edge of the sarcofage and soughed, strertching her legs carefully: the left one still hurted.  
"He seemed to, but I think that he was just trying to scare me. Maybe he thought that if I were scared, he could catch me easier."

"Oh, my princess, from all the metauphors and allegories, encicrling Royal Family and their servant priests to protect the Holy Reign from invaders from the outside and inside, only one thing is not metaphoric and allegoric at all — necessity of taking care of the dead," said Sath-Ren with an awe in his voice. "An Initiation Rite Tephis spoke about is performed to remember the princess of the first queen's suffering. Normally a healthy young woman can cope with it, but the impressions are, well, so painfully vivid that they make a future queen very quet. There are few whose mind is really damaged, but not as many as Tephis said. It is interesting but unimportant in connection with what you are really ought to know about the land and the Royal Blood."

"Unimportant? Unimportant?!" exclaimed Nikteb indignantly. "Do you, you old, dead fool, know what the importance is? I could be crippled, turned into the will-less doll! How can you..."

"I know what is important, my princess," Sath-Ren cut Nikteb persistantly but gently. "It is vitally important to take care of the dead. And sometimes, when being especially well cared, when given a chance to get out the sarcofage and walk on their own legs in their ripped and bandaged bodies, dead can reward their servants. Especially the Royal Dead, who never had such power while living, who always were a metaphor, a symbol of a god, an illusion of magic — which is the most sacred and most heavy duty of every Pharaoh. But in their Afterlife... they change. Their spirits are changing, their natures are changing, and their dead bodies became the traps for their spirits. The rites canthe spirit in, the smell of incense can force it to sleep for the some time, the rite and old, weak magic still remaining in words and hymns can trick them into rest, but not for a very long time — in the end, a Royal Family member open his eyes in his sarcofage, and his eyes are glowing in darkness. One Royal Dead can bring great death and destruction if get out from Necropolis, and what about the army — the army of the Royal Dead?"

"What army?" Nikteb didn’t understand Sath-Ren. He was talking about the things she had never heard before, never mentioned even in the most controversial texts in the most forbidden papyruses. She even forgotten of her anger about Initiation Rite as the confession of the old priest sounded like a madman's wanderings.

"Shouldn’t dead kings, their mothers and sisters, their wives and daughters join the gods and the ancestors’ souls in the gardens of..."

"There are no Gardens, child," Sath-Ren said harshly, and Nikteb squeaked quietly instead of calling the old priest to order and making him to repeat everything he said slowlier, and, if possible, more distinct, in less complicated words. "No Afterlife for the Rulers of Flaming Scorch and their families. Thousands of years ago, when the Sun was a god, it wasn’t a fatherlike god at all, like painted on the temple walls and carved in holy stones. Once the Sun turned a blooming kingdom into a desert and tried to sear the last river that gave water to our cities and towns. The king fell trying to win in a strife with the Sun, trying to force the Sun to spare the kingdom, but the Sun only laughed at him and said, 'No! Your land will be my sacrifice.' And when came the priest."

"A priest?" whispered Nikteb.

"Yes," was the bitter answer. "A priest. That priest served in the temple of Goddes of Fertility. He and his fellow priests saw the king fell, pierced by a spear of light, the punishing ray of the Sun. The priest returned to his temple and prayed to his Goddes, asking her to have mercy on him and his people and to protect them from the anger of the Sun."

"And the Goddess?"

"She answered the priest with the lips of a servant girl, whom she chose to be her vessel. She told the priest to offer her as a sacrifice for the Sun God, while she was concealing her true nature. She told the priest to cheat on the Sun, to tell him that the girl was a princess, a king’s daughter. The land gave her to the Sun as the people kneeled before his power."

"So I originate from the priests?" asked Nikteb with curiosity. Her wounds were still aching, but she didn’t feel it as strong and painful as when she just crept into the tomb. She didn't even feel her knee sore (maybe it was because she got used to the pain), it didn’t seem so big after all.

"Do not interrupt, my princess, listen," asked Sath-Ren turgidly. "So the priests in procession led by the servant of the Goddes of Fertlilty came to the most scorched and desolated place of the desert at dawn. They waited for the Sun God descended, and offered him the princess. Sun God was pleased with the people finally accepted his powe, lso the land become a home for his true children — spirits of light and fire. He touched the servant with his glowing hand, and her skin set on fire. Servant screamed while her skin melted, but out of her burned flesh a silver light appeared. That was the Goddes of Fertility, Winged Moon, who came to fight the Sun God which she was able to do only by hiding in the servant’s body from his merciless light and heat."

"Did the Winged Moon win the fight?"

"Yes, my princess. That was the clash of gods in which mountains were shaking and sand was raging like a stormy sea. Many great cities came to dust, and many people and sun spirits died while they fought until the time itself stopped, and the desert sank in darkness. The priest of Winged Moon crawled from the sand and cried as he understood that the Winged Moon destroyed the Sun God, but the Sun God managed to wound her mortally. The gods were dying, and the Sun itself, and the Moon, and the stars died with them altogether. He cried is despair for he had lost all he valued the most: his Goddes, his people and his daughter, who was a servant whom Winged Moon chose to be her vessel. A slow moan was the answer to his cry, it came from under the sand, so the priest started to dig with his bare hands. What he found was the crippled body of his daughter, still glowing with the silver blood of Goddess. Goddess was dying in her, and the priest had nothing to do but grieve other two bodies — heavenly and made of flesh, but Winged Moon asked him to stop shedding tears. 'My servant,' she said, 'My powers are low, so is my spirit. This is a time when even a Goddess had to die. But the land needs the Sun and the Moon, and it needs a king. Take the heart out of our chest and eat it, eat the heart of your daughter still glowing with my power. With this sacrilege you will communion with my power and after you will do it, you will know how to make the things right. A great good it will be for your land, but the greatest curse it will become for your soul and the souls of your children and the children of your children, but that is the final sacrifice you need to make for me and your people.'"

"I got it," said Nikteb thoughtfully. "He ate the heart of his own daughter, which was also the heart of the goddess. It’s not even a sacrilege, it is something much worse. A man decided to do such thing will be more than cursed, he will be doomed..."

"But also protected with the powers he accepted from the Goddes," eagerly explained the old priest. "So he took the heart out ouf his daughter’s chest and ate it. The power struck him as he opened his eyes and saw the world as it was seen by the gods: saw the dead spirits of extinguished stars, saw the body of Sun God, smoking like a firebrand, saw the streams of frozen argent where the Goddess' blood sheded. So he took the corpses of gods and called to the remains of the life power in them, and they became alive once again, but what a morbid, crippled, terrible state of life it was! Tears running down his face, the priest put the flaming body of the Sun God back in the sky, so he did with the silver blood of the Winged Moon, forming a sphere out of it, but her blood remained unstable: every month it ran dry, making the Moon Sphere fade, and every month it came back to life, fullfilling the Sphere. The last thing priest did was commanding the dead stars to shine again, so they did, for what they could not resist the command of the man who made the ultimate sacreliege and became a god himself."

"Now stop," told Nikteb, her fingers trembling. "So I am originating from a real god after all?"

"In a way, yes," Sath-Ren agreed reluctantly. "But becoming a god is not like becoming a priest, you know. It is not about the rites, and clothes, and words, but sometimes it is, except the times it is not. Priest’s body was a human’s one, so it could not keep the power of Winged Moon, backed by the darkest of arts, Necromancy, he applied to that day, for long. He still was able to revive his daughter and heal her wounds, but as Winged Moon died in her, her mind and soul died too. When the powers left him, the time came back as the sun shined over the desert, the survived people of Scorch — this is how the land was named then — came and saw him in all his shine and glory, they claimed him a new god. Only the priest knew what he was more a devil than a god for he ruined his immortal soul for the sake of his people. He wanted to die though he couldn't: he still had a duty to fulfill. He wrote laws, restored the cities and the temples, for the people needed something to believe in he invented the cult of himself, and in the end when the people demanded heirs, he had to marry his own daughter for the curse they shared mustn’t be given to anyone else."

"You are insane," said Nikteb with conviction. "You went mad here, in your tomb, or Tephis mutilated your spirit. How can you think that I will trust you after the disgusting story you've told? First Pharaoh wasn’t a necromant, and he didn’t eat his daughetr’s heart, soaking with the blood of a dead goddess. I am not going to listen to you. I am not going to believe you!"

"But you will have to," softly answered Sath-Ren’s voice. Rising from the sarcophagus, it sounded like he was standing right behind Nikteb’s back, so she had to turn back and look. It was nobody where — nobody but the fixtures covered with patina, ceremonial urns and little statues of Shabaki.

"No, I won’t," snapped Nikteb. She was frightened, her fear fed her anger and the more she feared, the more her anger grew. Tombs, monsters, spirits, necromancy — that was enough for her. They have no right to torture her like that. She was a princess of this land!

"Yes, you are a princess," humbly agred Sath-Ren, "soon to be queen. No matter how high you will stand, you will always know the truth now. The Royal Family nowadays are no gods. You cannot command the sands and stones, winds and Great River like Pharaoh of the past. But still you are cursed, and still your curse is the only thing that is making the sun rise and the moonshine, the morning come and the Great River flows. That’s why Scorch needs a Pharaoh of the Royal Blood, and that’s why Royal Family needs priests: we are backing your power in this life and hiding it closed in the Necropolis of Taa in another..."

"Shut up!" cried Nikteb, jumping off the sarcophagus's lid, unfortunately, forget about her leg. Though it looked better, it looked better only on the outside: when Nikteb’s feet hit the floor, it filled with pain so intense that Nikteb fell down, wriggling like a worm and screaming.

"My princess, I am too weak to cure your wound, out of this sarcophagus I can only ease your pain," Sath-Ren had to raise his voice for Nikteb to hear him through her screams and growling. "We have not much time left. You have to open the lid and let me in: he is coming after you, and you will not be able to fight him alone. Let me in, my princess, let me fulfill your vessel!"

"You are and old pervert!" Nikteb outbursted with tears. Her leg looked worse than ever, she couldn’t even touch it and couldn’t bear the cold of the stone floor, so she had to turn on her back and hold her knee vertically. That made her suffer even worse than she just lied on the floor, and Nikteb lied still, swallowing the tears. "I am not letting you in, I am not letting anyone in!"

"Tephis was taught to turn into a snake by Azeneth! The first Pharaoh taught the priests how to resist the Royal Dead, but he told us to use our power only for the good of Scorch! Tephis despised his duties and allied with the dead, he still believes that Azeneth is his love, but she is not! Her spirit changed and now she wants only to destroy her brother and the whole land! When she grew in her power, she will take over Tephis’s soul and the fool will become her slave forever!"

"Damn you and your Tephis, damn you and your mummies!" Nikteb couldn’t stop screaming, though the pain already stopped burning in her body and mind. Nikteb didn’t understand that was happening anymore, she only knew that she was in mortal danger, so she hated everyone and everything that lured her into this trap. Hysteric rose like a sandstorm, and in the end it absorbed Nikteb. "You all should die and suffer! I did nothing! I am just a prey for my father! But I am neither his queen nor his temple, and I am neither your vessel nor your instrument! Revenge Tephis if you can, but I won’t be your body — I won’t be nobody’s body! I’d better die..."

"I told you, my princess, that you will not die — at least, until Azeneth will get into you," new voice interfering the conversation sounded deep like and an abyss. It resoundingness made the floor shake, and small Shabaki statues fell on the floor, one of their heads' broken.

"You are a fool!" yelled Sath-Ren from the inside of the sarcophagus. "If Azeneth will get a body, she will destroy you and everyone around you!"

"Silence!" Tephis’s voice rose like thunder, it filled the tomb and crept hammering into Nikteb’s head. "I am here not for you, I am here for the princess. I didn’t need you when you were alive, you were a little bit more helpful when dead, but now your time have run out. Came to me, my princess, the rite will begin soon."

Nikteb was ready to another terrible bursts of thunder-like voice, but the silence fell, and in this silence she heard a distant roar of the giant grave worm, that made the coverings on the urns tremble. There were the distant sound of footsteps right after. It slightly cracked as though the one heading to the tomb was walking on the shattered pieces of clay, or, more likely, said little voice in Nikteb’s head, human bones.

"Sath-Ren, Sath-Ren," called Nikteb, creeping back to the sarcophagus. "Answer to me, Tephis is coming, help me!"

The silence was her answer. Few moments ago Nikteb could have given everything to make him silent, now she could give everything just to listen to his dusty, otherworldly voice again.

"Sath-Ren, please," begged Nikteb, feverishly fumbling her hands on the side of the sarcophagus. " I need you, come and help me!"

"My servant won’t answer you. Stop begging, child, meet your fate with the dignity of a queen," advised Tephis's voice. This time it sounded not like a thunder, but more like a single thunderous clap in the beginning the of storm.

"No, no, Sath-Ren, please," cried Nikteb, trying to push the lid from the sarcophagus, but it was too heavy for her, she couldn’t move it even if her life depended on this, but Nikteb’s life actually depended on it, and still she was helpless, until she saw that the sarcophagus lopsided when Sath-Ren’s spirit outraged. It made the lid move and a thin crack appeared between the lid and the sarcophagus. Nikteb tried to out her fingers into the crack and pick the lid, but she only broke her nails to the bleeding flesh.

The pain fullfilled Nikteb and she fell into some state of trance, where the pain wasn’t bothering her anymore. Her body was a ruin, but she need to move the lid, and all in the Universe what was really important was Nikteb’s hands on the damned stone. Nikteb pushed, and she pulled, and she bited her lips till she tore them. The taste of blood in Nikteb's mouth, blood on her hands, blood on her knee as she pushed into the floor while moving the lid. It seemed and endless, useless job, but when Tephis's steps were already heard inside the tomb, the lid fell.

Nikteb held her breath. The miracle! She wanted it so badly, wanted Sath-Ren rise from the grave and protect her. Nothing has happened but the heavy lid falling down and splitting the floor plate. There was a mummy inside the sarcophagus, dust and several empty beetles’ shells, which looked even less lively that the mummy itself.

Tephis put his hands on Nikteb’s shoulders and she started. He drove his lips to her ear and said, pulling the words, "You needn’t strive like that, child, you would never win — just spoil your body allotted for my queen."

"No," Nikteb’s tear dropped on the yellowish mummy’s bandages.

"Yes," Tephis pressed his fingers on Nikteb’s shoulders. "Come. We do not have that much time left."

Nikteb wasn’t able to stand so Tephis had to drag her on the floor as a sack of sugar cane. Before Tephis dragged Nikteb, her desperate gaze noticed a little cloud of dust, rising from the mummy and determinally heading to Nikteb's face. It stirred her nostrills, so Nikteb sneezed — and this the next breath swallowed it. Nikteb was desperately praying for help when Tephis took her out to the cave of bones, where the grave worm awaited, like a giant dog, for his master. Tephis took Nikteb on his shoulder, and the worm with the rumbling sound dug deeper into the bones, letting Tephis step on his back, and when Tephis did it, the worm rose, stretching till he got to the hole in the dome of the cave.

As Nikteb hung down from Tephis's shoulder, she pressed to his sweaten spine and felt his heartbeat quick and thrilled. Hastiness with wich Tephis jumped on the hall floot from the worm's spine betrayed him: he was extremely mervous though tried to look calm. And when it happened again, the distant old man’s creaky voice in her head, saying with contempt, "He is so weak, my princess". Before Nikteb wondered that was going on, she felt a buzz in her chest. She coughed once, coughed for the second time, her throat tickling. When she coughed for the third time, she saw greenish moths coming from her mouth and heard herself sayng, "Well, my boy, wasn’t harder than you thought to outsmart your old teacher?"


	5. Royal Undead

"So you’ve crept into her body," said Tephis in a low, mild voice. "Fine, fine. And this, I guess, is all that you are capable of now."

Tephis threw Nikteb on the floor, but instead of falling she bounced like a ball and jumped on her feet like being made of air and jellied yellow cane juice. Her body fulfilled with bursting energy when the pain in the broken knee pierced Nikteb stridently.

She moaned — not with her lips, possessed by Sath-Ren, her silent groan lasted inside of her head, echoing in her eardrums. The echo of it was becoming more and quieter until it was so weak and distant that seemed to Nikteb more an image of the pain than a real one.

Nikteb suffered no more. And she wasn't afraid as the power struck from the Sath-Ren's spirit in her breath.

"You and the Abomination you dragged out of its sarcophagus won’t profane the land any longer," with every word Sath-Ren spoke through Nikteb’s lips, green moths flew out to molder into the glowing dust.

"Maybe you want to speak to my Abomination by yourself," asked Tephis insinuatingly, "to make sure that this Abomination is truly the woman you swore to serve in your life and death?"

Sath-Ren made a deep, slow breath — Nikteb felt her lungs moving like bellow. The feeling of something alien inside her was strong, it kept her conscious. Nikteb couldn't speak, couldn't move if Sath-Ren didn't want her to. All the power he gave didn't belong to her, it belonged to him as Sath-Ren got into Nikteb's and was wearing her like a leopard skin. He protected Nikteb, but he also needed her to fight Tephis, and Nikteb was afraid that the fight wouldn't be the what she could stand.

Meanwhile, Tephis put his hands together in a gesture of prey, moving his lips though making no sound. Sath-Ren in response started to sing an archaic hymn with his jingling old man’s voice. It seemed to Nikteb that Sath-Ren only wanted to annoy Tephis and distract him, whose face twitched with irritation though Sath-Ren obviously managed to do something more than the sheer distraction. While Tephis continued whispering, a pale blue ghostly rose appeared in his hands. The rose didn't survived Sath-Ren's singing and faded away as it opened its petals.

"Enough!" commanded Tephis heatedly. As the rose extinguished in his hands, it left deep dark red marks on his skin, smelling with burnt flesh. Sath-Ren cleared his — actually, Nikteb’s — throat, clearly going to burst out with another passionate convicting speech, but Tephis brashly outstretched his arm. Before Nikteb understood what did he do, she Nikteb fell down and rolled on the plates, being whipped by an invisible lash.

Nikteb hit her head on one’s plate sticking corner. It all happened so fast that she didn’t manage to squeak. Lying on the floor, Nikteb felt her body like a piece of a beaten off meat, never stopping to ache. She was wondering if she was going to make it in one piece, or a very small part of her Royal Body would find a way out through this neverending nightmare.

While Nikteb was gasping the air, Sath-Ren’s presence in her body became so faint that already unnoticeable. The pain returned, borrowed powers of the old priest faded away. Tephis smiled to Nikteb as she was prostrated before him, then moved his arms aside, as though offering himself to something, and cried, "Come to me, my lady, as I am a faithful servant of you! Come to me and fill me with your power!"

Nothing had happened, at first, Tephis seemed puzzled. Nikteb looked at Tephis misunderstandingly: he looked like a prophet waiting for an ultimate miracle, which suddenly didn’t reveal to him. Nikteb tiresomely thought that it would be funny if Tephis just stood and called like this till dawn when the Royal Guards would come and save her. Then she felt the draft coming from the distant place of the hall sank in the darkness.

With the draft, a whisper came: it was either a whisper or an echo of many quiet mumbling voices, which seemed to Nikteb slightly familiar. As she listened, she missed changes happening to Tephis’s body. When he spoke, Nikteb shivered — that voice she could distinguish even being half-deaf, half-blind and half-mad.

"Who are you to call me Abomination — me, the true queen of Scorch?" began Tephis in a deep, richly modulated voice. His eyes glowed with smoky blue, he shook as the sparks of lightning enflamed, coming through his body. "Who are you to resist me, worm?"

"Aunt Azeneth," called Nikteb. She tried to rise on elbows, but that only made her ribs hurt. "Aunt Azeneth, don’t you remember me? It’s I, princess Nikteb!"

Blueness in Tephis’s eyes flashed, as he looked down at Nikteb. A slight, knowing, spoiled smile came down on his lips that looked more feminine than ever.

"Ah! My little nephew. So grown up you are, so tall, so beautiful — not a girl, yet a young woman. Tell me, dear, does the throne cost all that you’ve been through? Especially knowing that you will never be able to sit on it for a noticeably long time, you, little bitch."

"What?" words came from Nikteb’s lips before she realised she spoke.

"You heard me well. I know what you want. You think if he will take your hole and use it, will fill you with his precious seed, you will become worthy of the throne? Or a kingdom? No, you will not!"

"I don’t need a kingdom," mumbled Nikteb, shocked. All Tephis’s moves, all his mimes, all his gestures were so alike with Azeneth’s, but his words — Azeneth couldn’t speak so cruel. The real Azeneth, Azeneth that Nikteb remembered, would never talk to her like that. "I don’t even want it. I never chose my father — he chose me. What are you blaming me for — for he wants an heir?"

"You are so stupid it disgusts me," Azeneth twisted Tephis's lips. It was strange to see Tephis's face move like a wooden mask made of many flexible little panels, started to act on the decision of the one who used that mask. "Menkhet wanted me, but he would never be allowed to call our son the heir of Scorch. And who could I become to him in that case? A mother of his future wife? Now this is Abomination, not the help Tephis gave me after Menkhet got me killed. You know why? He was jealous for I would make a better ruler than he himself, godlike king of all that is Scorch. It was me who ruled, and he only acted on my advice!"

"You are dead, princess," Sath-Ren’s voice suddenly came from Nikteb’s parched lips. "Game of power is for the living ones, and you are dead — you have to accept it."

"I am dead?" laughed Azeneth. "No, I am not dead. I am Undead! The Royal Undead that will rule again! Soon Scorch will be my land, and with the power of the Royal Dead I, Queen Azeneth, will rule forever!," declared Azeneth, her eyes shining with piercing blue.

For a flash of a moment, Nikteb saw her in her real form: a beautiful woman of refined features, with proud chin and gestures of a queen. Azeneth’s image covered Tephis with the blue light. As the light glowed brighter, the plates of the floor started trembling, and when, one by one, flew up to the ceiling to stop somewhere in the midair. The plate Azeneth stood was higher than Nikteb's, Nikteb was like a beggar before the throne. Making sure that Nikteb felt it, Azeneth smiled gloriously, her eyes were looking at Nikteb with triumph.

"Your beloved father and husband sentenced me, locked me in my stiff tomb to make me silent, but he did not succeed. Undead I am more powerful than ever, and in your body, I will walk the land of the living once again. I will ruin Menkhet just like he ruined me. When I will reign, I will open the doors of Necropolis to let the magic come to my world to run through my veins!"

"I won’t let you," Sath-Ren creaked in Nikteb’s throat. The old priest was too weak, Nikteb only felt his resistance inside her. Greenish moths came from her mouth slowly to fade away before Sath-Ren ended the sentence.

Nikteb looked at Tephis’s face under the glowing blue Azeneth’s mask, it was distorted with suffering. His mouth half-open, he looked at Nikteb with terror while his smooth cheeks promptly covered with wrinkles and brown stains covering skin made it look like a skin of a weary giraffe’s. The furious Azeneth became, the more life she took from Tephis. The man in his early thirties came to the sunset years of his life second by second: skin fitted his trembling fingers, his back bend under the burden of age and his eyes became dull like bleached nutshells.

"My lady," whispered Tephis, "please!"

"Do not beg of me, my servant," Azeneth cut him down with his own lips. "You did the best you could, but now it’s little princess’ turn. I will not forget your sacrifice, this I promise, but you must not be selfish when the destiny of your queen is decided by gods."

"So you've thought she would value you? Award you, maybe?" Sath-Ren laughed abruptly. "You wanted to create a goddess of your own and crown her as queen, so what you now get is the gratitude of a godlike kind."

"I never commanded you to speak!" Azeneth cried. The lightstorm of her anger covered her like a cocoon of flashing energy. An electric lash cocked over Nikteb’s head, enlightening the bas-relief of dog-headed guards stroke the maleficent spirits. Suddenly Nikteb realised: that was not a bas-relief. Giant statues were moving surprisingly quiet for such colossuses, their spears were going to hit Azeneth right in the back.

Collars of Shabaki guards were gleaming with green. This was the explanation of Sath-Ren’s weakness: with all his power he awakened the guards and the guards were here to put Azeneth down. Azeneth noticed them when it was already too late. Giant spears pierced Tephis's body with the scrunch of torn flesh and broken bones. The streams of blood washed away the blue glow as what was left of Tephis squirmed on the bloody red flying plate.

Dying, Tephis yelled terribly, but even more terrible was Azeneth’s scream. It seemed to Nikteb that the blue glow of her spirit ran out, but it didn’t. It went dark blue, collapsing into the blackness so impenetrable that even the darkness of the hall differed from it, like the darkness of a cosmic abyss differed from the darkness of the cellar.

Darkness entwined like a hurricane, tearing the shadows, making Nikteb’s hair flow and the clouds of dust arise from the remains of the floor over the bone pit, where raged Tephis’s grave worm. In the hurricane buzzing like a hive, a face appeared — a terrible face of noseless, eyeless, earless demon with only a mouth full of a bottomless void. From this void the shriek rose, crumbling stone into dust.

One of moving Shabaki statues fell onto his knee. His stone leg cracked, and the other Shabaki forfeited a bigger part of his head. Stone shards fell into the bone pit with a tremendous rumble that made Necropolis walls shudder. Stones hit the worm, who, roaring with anger, held on the first Shabaki guard injured leg and dragged him into the bone pit, breaking what had left from the floor.

Satisfied with the destruction made, the demonic hive of aunt Azeneth’s soul turned to Nikteb who, to her greatest surprise, was still alive, though the plate she was lying at should have been melted into the stone dust with Azeneth’s shriek. Nikteb was floating in the center of a greenish whirl, holding her safe above the bone pit, slowly moving to its pointy tail, abutting into the beginning of a small and very old staircase on another side of the hall, which Nikteb hadn’t noticed before.

"You should now go, princess," said Sath-Ren’s voice in Nikteb's head. "A mortal needn’t see that shall happen here. Either Azeneth or I prevail, the outcome will be pitiful for the land and the people. You should go, my princess, you should find the one who will become a new priest, the one who would contain the knowledge and the burden. The one who will stop the terror... Now go!"

"Where should I go?" beseeched Nikteb. "I know nothing of this place and it’s secrets."

"You will learn," whispered Sath-Ren, as Nikteb’s feet touched the ground. A crash convulsed the hall, howls of demonic hurricane went stronger. Holding her hands on the wall, Nikteb hurried down the staircase as fast as she could with her body soaking with pain.

While Nikteb was walking, distant images came into her mind: a staircase; a long passage in each arc of it Shabaki stood, covered with tarnished gilding; a bronze door, footprints leading to it into the deep soft layer of dust mixed with sand. Behind the doors were the ancient tomb with the piles of sarcophagi so old that carved names and holy symbols became indistinguishable. Over the piles long and weary cane ladder appeared, coming far up to the ghostly gray light of the air shafts, carved in the dome of the tomb.

Necropolis walls were trembling like a frightened horse, Nikteb felt it when her hands touched the stone, but the deeper she went, the weaker the shiver was. Staircase seemed neverending, but what really was a strive was to reach the bronze door in the end of long passage full of dog-headed guards statues. When Nikteb took her first step into the passage, she saw it and swallowed nervously.

Half-immured in the walls, Shabaki statues slowly, implacably, like only stone could, moved, trying to release their members from the wall. As Nikteb passed by, they visibly tried to outstretch to her. She never knew if they were trying to greet her as their princess or to destroy like an Abomination Azeneth become, stirred by the Royal Blood making the aunt and the nephew alike to the gaze of the stone eyes.

Nikteb went through the passage, keeping the bronze door in sight. She walked strictly at the center of the passage, as any move towards the walls would make Shabaki catch her. The worst was not the pain tortured Nikteb with her every step, not the statues of Underworld guardians trying to break free from walls. The worst was that the rasping of stone and the shiver of the ancient walls were not the only things Nikteb heard. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't convince herself it wasn't real.

The sound was quiet like a mosquito squeak and hardly audible in the beginning of the passage. Before the door it became loud and gripping, filling Nikteb’s ears, getting to her brain to itch in there, to drive her mad. It was the sound of old creaky bandages, accompanied by rattle and skirr but distant, muffled moans. Something was hiding there, a nameless, shapeless stirring multitude that was scratching on the doors and on the walls, moving, waving, surging, fluttering. It might have been waves, but slow and tremendous like no waves had ever been.

Nikteb didn’t believe in waves behind the closed tomb doors for even a second, but if she tried to think over the sound in a way her imagination suggested, she would possibly burst out with the cries of fear and desperation. Crying and yelling, she would run down the passage, and when, lost in Necropolis dungeons, she would hide in the deepest and darkest corner of it. It was what she couldn't afford — if Nikteb wanted to get back to Maneha, she needed to overcome her fear and go, so she went.

Waking dog-headed guardians behind her back, invincible like stone and single-minded like ancient magic that gave them live, Nikteb went to the bronze door of her fears. The terrible sounds coming from it made Nikteb’s heart nearly stop from terror. She had to make her choice: to face the unknown again or to be possibly buried alive by the servants of guarding magic. If Sath-Ren still controlled Shabaki, they would spare her. And if Shabaki was controlled by Azeneth?

Could that count to one of the harsh decisions queens had to make sometimes, Nikteb sighed. All that she wanted was to fall down on the floor, cuddle, grab her own knees and cry for Andama to take her home, but Nikteb must act — quickly, determinedly, and, if possible, wisely.

Nikteb was confused what Sath-Ren showed her only the passage, but not it’s dangers. If the passage was that kind dangerous, Sath-Ren wouldn’t show it to Nikteb, would he? NIkteb talked to herself in doubts, and her suspicions didn’t make the sounds behind the door sound less dreadful. It was harder and harder to decide to rush into the tomb to get to the ladder. Nikteb felt like she would stand here forever, pretending to think and savouring her rest.

The dog-headed guards didn’t waste their time while Nikteb froze as the rumble behind her back grew louder. It was now accompanied by the echo of heavy steps, that sound wrested Nikteb from the apathy of desperation. She grabbed the handle and pulled, but the door didn’t yield. Nikteb pulled once again with both hands, but it didn't move even for an inch.

When the steps came closer, Nikteb brought herself on the door, screaming. She remembered Sath-Ren's sarcophagi, and when the door moved, letting her in and closing with a loud bang. Pushed forward, Nikteb fell on her hands and knees, tearing what hadn’t been torn yet on the sand and small shattered rocks. Here the sound that terrified her in the passage was buzzing and filling the emptiness of the forlorn tomb. when Nikteb raised her head, she saw something that she had never seen before even on that day, full of mortal danger and terrors.

A stormy sea outspread before Nikteb, but that was not the sea of waves — it was the sea of flesh. Opened sarcophagi lied, abandoned. They fell from the cell-tombs of older ages, carved from feet to top of the stone walls. Dead crept out of the sarcophagi like larvas, like terrible worms they entwined, the crippled bodies matched each other in the mosaic of eternal pain. The sound Nikteb heard was produced by that multiple of scorched throats full of dust and sand, throats never cleared with a cough as the dead had no lungs to push the air through.

Carved, salvaged, dried in stiff underground air, soaked with balsams and incense made their flesh petered out, made their bones creaks and crunch; the centuries passing over their heads looking more like mangy skulls, spoiled their spirits, destroyed the very spark of Afterlife in the depths of their corpses. Still they heard the echoes of the battle in the hall upstairs, felt the magic floating in the air filled they with the lust for long forgotten live.

They were the Royal Dead, too. The Royal Dead of the ancient time when the rites were not so perfect, and though the magic were stronger than nowadays, it was more rural, rawer, less refine. The shapeless mass rolling on the floor was trying to keep its many legs, and arms and spines together were hNikteb's glorious ancestors, the Pharaohs of the First Ages, who made the Scorch what it was and built the most of its glory. So might the cursed and blessed priest and his dead-and-rose-again daughter be among them?

Nikteb could never know. Also, she never knew how to get through the Royal Dead to the cane ladder, which unclear silhouette she saw after the squib crypts in the dim light of the morning — or evening desert, falling through the shafts. How many time Nikteb spent here, underground, falling from desperate hope to hopeful desperation? She didn’t know. All that she knew that the ladder was her last chance for salvation, and yet she couldn’t reach it.

After what Azeneth said, Nikteb didn’t believe in the holy protection of her ancestors anymore. If the Royal Bloodline started from the Abomination of Necromancy, cannibalism and sacrilege, Nikteb and all the Royal Family were doomed by gods they killed. The pact was sealed with their blood, that’s why it became Royal; the ancient magic was the what nourished the life of Scorch, and that’s why the priests needed the Pharaoh to rule by any cost. It was because no matter how much power and knowledge the priests had, nothing would work without the people, men and women, who were cursed to be the living gods while the ones who were gods were slaughtered in the name of the people.

Tears streamed down Nikteb’s cheeks. She saw what awaited her in the crypts and dungeons of Necropolis clearly: she would become or a blood lusting demon like Azeneth, or, if spent time enough in the lifeless abysses of the City of the Dead, driven mad by the truth. Nikteb's soul would never reach the heavens, it would be always locked down there in the company of million suffering souls, her close and distant relatives. And what if she escaped, for how long could she delay her sentence?

Nikteb started as she heard the familiar sound. No, it would be impossible — a chariot, here? But the second thing that happened was a golden chariot yoked by six undead horses with flaming eyes and manes, flashed the hall of the ancient crypts like a hurricane. A mummy drove the chariot, a mummy in luxurious finery and high crown of Pharaoh. Its eyes were glowing with the same blue light Nikteb saw with Azeneth’s spirit. Whipping the horses with the reins, mummy screamed with a high pitched voice.

"Back! Back you disgusting Abominations! Your time has passed aeons ago! I, Pharaoh Totenkhet, the savior of the Scorch, sacrificed all that I had for the throne, and now it is mine — mine and not yours, you creeps who will die for a second time under the wheels of my War Chariot!"

Nikteb looked at all this with her mouth opened. Pharaoh Totenkhet awakened, too, and was doing exactly what she got used to in her lifetime: war. In her Afterlife Totenkhet wasn’t aware of only one thing: the chariot she was driving wasn’t the war one, it was a ceremonial one. It wasn't of too much fit for trumping the enemies down the wheels, so the elder Royal Dead didn't put too much attention at Totenkhet riding on their backs though she managed to damage them a little.

As the pieces of gilding fell off the boards of the chariot and its wheels dangerously leaped and rattled on its axis, Pharaoh Totenkhet was very close to flying out of the chariot, but she seemed to enjoy the dangerous ride just like Tephis on his way to Necropolis. Nikteb didn’t dare to hail Totenkhet and warn her because she wasn’t sure that Totenkhet wouldn’t consider her as an enemy, and remained silent. What Nikteb knew for sure, if she got out the Necropolis, she would command her charioteers to never ride that fast.

Totenkhet chariot turned the last crypt and rode into the next hall. While the many undead were trying to pull their bodies together, Nikteb would have time to run (or, at least, to walk fast as her knee still hurt) to the ladder and climb up, but she just couldn’t make herself making the first step. Nikteb was spared of making a decision as the bronze doors shuddered and dog’s head in the size of two Nikteb’s stamped on it, as though being hit from the inside with the power no man ever had.

So it was time to go, and Nikteb went. She hastily went among the crypts, limping, urging herself not to look back, heavy-handedly dodging the exsiccated arms of the corpses outstretching to her with the grace of half-smashed frog. Even when the bronze doors opened with clang and clatter, Nikteb didn’t look back as her hands grabbed the ladder. She was safe, she just needed to climb up and get out of this terrible place once and for all.

There was another sound of clash Nikteb didn't put her attention at. She climbed, watching the wall, her teeth clenched: the moaning, the crying, the roaring and the screeching was heard downstairs. Familiar voice proclaimed again and again that everyone must bend before the Pharaoh the Saviour; bent or die in the name of Scorch Glory. No matter what was happening there, it was not Nikteb’s war. She was not going to interfere as she preferred the living: her goal was to survive and, at last, it seemed like she was succeeding.

Carved in limestone, air shafts was made to keep the bodies dry — the invention of the builders of the past, later replaced by not such evident measures. Nikteb was at the last steps of the ladder, her hand on the strangely warm stone, she couldn’t keep from taking the last look at Necropolis she was finally leaving. What she had seen set the terror into her heart. It was a battle everyone versus everyone: the extended helms of the Golden Age, and chariots in the middle of the fight, Royal Dead of ancient ages forming a wave that was going to hit the dog-headed guards, standing in the open bronze doors, to the ground.

The height was dizzy. Nikteb held the ladder tight, closing her eyes, but suddenly opened it again. It was something else that Nikteb saw, and it was climbing up the ladder making it shiver and creak. It was a man so old that he looked more like a corpse than a living one. Firstly Nikteb thought it was a mummy trying to break free, but she had the knowing of the garments on the old man’s shoulders. His red skirt seemed slightly recognizable, too: it once was white but was coloured by the blood of its owner.

"Tephis!" shrieked Nikteb. She spasmodically drew her body in the shaft, balking into the stone with elbows and knees. Luckily, vertical shaft had raw deepenings for hands and feet. Still Nikteb felt uneasy with the thought of terrible creature going after her. Nikteb looked down, holding on to the deepenings hard, to make sure what Tephis she saw o the ladder wasn't a hallucination of the exhausted mind.

Unfortunately, he wasn't.

Tephis looked even worse when Shabaki killed him. From shoulder to hip he was an open wound, and the wound was still soaking with thick, dark-red blood. The two halves of him where astringed together with a leather belt, covered with golden garments which Tephis used to wear on his waist, so his skirt, left on loose, were slowly moving down to his hips, opening the belly from which something morbidly-lilac protruded, trickling with yellow slime. Tephis’s face bore terrible likeness with a skull, swift with yellow-gray wrinkled skin. His blind milky white eyes looking from deep brown sockets were the eyes of a dead man, but this dead man still wanted to live.

Nikteb cried, but her cry was muted by the noisy struggle between the dead and the stone. Tephis seemed to hear it, and climbed the ladder even more faster though it made his shoulder hang down and the hole in his chest open, showing Nikteb smashed mess spiked with broken ribs his innards became. Nikteb cried again, and Tephis raised his head, his movements became more determined. He exactly knew where she was and was trying to get her as hard as it was possible for the one who needed to put himself together literally — by the hand he held his ribs when the belt started cracking and garments lopsided.

"What do you want from me, you monster?! You nearly killed me, and now you are dead, what do you want from me now!" shouted Nikteb, knowing that there would be no answer for her desperate outcry. To her terror, Tephis seemed to be talking back, though it was hard — his throat was parted from his lungs from the very same weapon that cracked his chest open. There was no more blood on his lips but the parched one, but he croaked and croaked, and his croaks sounded for Nikteb like the sound of nails scratching the stone.

"Please, stop!" screeched Nikteb, pushing the ladder. Tephis was in several stairs from her, he outstretched his hand with dark blood under his broken nails, trying to grab Nitkeb’s hand, but she shoved the ladder once more. Old ladder seemed to grow into the limestone, but fear and anger gave Nikteb strength and she manage to push it away.

It started falling, slowly, with Tephis holding on to it, his blind eyes senselessly looking into the dome of the cave. His lips were still moving, and it seemed to Nikteb that he was repeating something, again and again. Was it a prayer or a curse? It didn't help him when the ladder hit the statues of lamenting spirits of Death and small gods, accompanied the souls into the Underworld, but on its way to the mess of Royal Dead down the hall the ladder got grabbed by the immense hand. The whole wall over the bronze gates was the bust of Heevo, Three-Faced God of the Guardians, each of his faces was the dogs of Mercy, Justice and Sentence.

Tephis stuck out of Heevo’s fist, helplessly moving his hands like a beetle. Heevo looked at him, bringing Tephis to his stone faces one by one, but didn’t seem to be satisfied with what he saw. Calm faces of white marble fitted it limestone met everywhere under the sands where the desert was looked distant and cold. It was not too many opportunities for the statue to look calm and involved, thought Nikteb nervously. Didn’t come to any conclusion on Tephis, Heevo looked down on the battle among the crypts and sarcophagi and carelessly clenched his fist.

Now that was more than Nikteb could bear that day. She climbed up the air shaft, not thinking of anything but to get out of Necropolis and never to come back, even maybe never to come back to the land of her fathers again. There was a sand storm howling outside, Nikteb felt it’s skin-ripping breeze on her face and naked arms, but she didn’t care — even death in sands was better when being locked in the dungeons filled with demons and undead relatives.

But could she even die? Nikteb wasn’t sure if she slept with a mortal dream in the sands of Scorch she wouldn’t one day woke up a withered corpse and roam the desert, moaning from pain and desolation, and slowly driven crazy by the trap her body became to her spirit. The death wasn’t the end and the beginning for the Royal Family, it was a continuation, ripped of hope and forgiveness, but forgiveness for what — for the greatest sacrifice of their ancestor, which became the greater curse?

Nikteb wasn’t crying, she ran out of tears. She didn’t remember how he dug her way out of air shaft, slowly skidding with sand, and rushed into the raging storm. Sand scratched Nikteb’s skin, wind tried to knock her down. She struggled as long as she could till she stumbled and rolled down the dune, sticking in the sand which suddenly seemed to Nikteb soft as duvets. She closed her eyes, thinking this wouldn’t be a most terrible death, and after all, it was more like a dream with no dreams at all, a dream in a soft calm night bringing rest to wretched body.

The last thing that Nikteb saw in yellow-brown sand flickering was the silhouette of a man in flattering blue clothing, and a pale white ghost of a woman approaching. That must be the priest of a Moon Goddes and his daughter. Had they come to greet Nikteb in her sorrowful afterlife or give her the words of advice? There wouldn’t be no gods for her, but at least also no demons: to met the first Pharaoh of Scorch on her dying sandbed wasn’t bad — it might always have been worse.

White figure outstretched her hand, and the man in blue approached, mumbling, "Of course, a girl in the sand: undone sacrifice. And when she’ll die in my hands giving me that romantic look, and when she will turn into the living dead and will try to drink my eyeballs out or something. I’ve seen it, I’ve already seen it. What are you looking at it, witch? I will stab her, not save... aarrgh!"

The man fell on his knees grabbing the wrist of his hand with another one, moaning and cursing the figure in white, which outstretched her hand, pointing at Nikteb once again. She came closer, but there were no footprints where her clothing soared over the sand. Her eyes under the veil where gloaming blue, and the glimpse of it was enough for Nikteb to lose consciousness.

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked this one, you may also like my another original work: http://archiveofourown.org/works/5418119/chapters/12518492


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